Posted by Torgny Bjers on 10/20/61 11:29

Jasper Bryant-Greene wrote:

> Richard Lynch wrote:
>
>> On Sat, October 15, 2005 7:26 am, Edward Vermillion wrote:
>>
>> > Do they want the PDF to display in the page, or is a link to a PDF
>> > ok for them?
>>
>>
>> I've already warned them that a PDF embedded into a page is
>> impossible.
>>
>> That may not be true, technically, for all I know, but I've sure
>> never seen it, and don't even want to try to go somewhere that so few
>> have gone.
>>
>
> I would expect that putting the PDF in an <iframe> would work, but I
> wouldn't trust browsers or the Acrobat plugin to not crash horribly in
> that sort of situation. It's also going to be very confusing for users
> seeing the Acrobat toolbar floating in the middle of their page.
>
> It would be interesting to see some tests of PDF-in-<iframe> done in
> various different browsers, but unless it just happened to work
> perfectly in every common browser (we can all dream, can't we?) I
> wouldn't touch it.
>
> Jasper


After some consideration I am pretty sure it works, since an <iframe/>
is just the same as a <frame/>, and I am dead certain you can open a PDF
document, or a Word document, or a Flash file, inside a frame without
anything crashing. As for the PDF toolbar, I think that with the proper
CSS styles on the <iframe/> element you can make it pretty apparent that
the <iframe/> contains a PDF document.

Also, when using <iframe/> you are weeding out those old browsers that
wouldn't support even loading an <iframe/>, which means that you get
relatively new browsers, and those should all support this method.

Besides, if this is for an editor interface, for a specific client, one
could reasonably demand that they use at least one of the newer browsers
such as IE5+ or Mozilla. If not for a specific client, or subset of
clients, but for a general update of an entire application that is open
sourced, I agree with Jasper, don't touch it. :)

Regards,
Torgny

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