How to embed PDF in HTML web pages is a question that has been asked a lot over the years at our PDF user community site at Planet PDF. If you search around the old articles and forum discussions you’ll find a bunch of discussion on it and tricks to make it happen. In the past, however, most of them were pretty unstable or unreliable — it was more of a matter of showing how it could be achieved technically rather than implementing confidently on a real live site.
With the new breed of Web 2.0 sites a new way has evolved that is a lot more reliable. Relatively new document sharing sites such as Scribd and Adobe Share (beta) let you upload your PDF files and, once on their site, they provide you with simple code to place in your web page which displays the contents of your PDF files inside a little Flash-based wrapper. From there users can zoom in and out, navigate between pages, and save the file to their local computer. The additional benefit, for some users, is the fact that using these free services reduces bandwidth as (sometimes quite large) PDFs are stored on an external server.
If you look below, you’ll see a screenshot of how it looks. (Unfortunately with our current WordPress configuration we aren’t able to get it to embed here — we’re moving this blog across to the official Nitro PDF site soon and once that occurs we’ll be able to do some more exciting demonstrations here.) In the meantime, just click on the screenshot to visit Scribd for a real live example.
Update: Looks like WordPress now lets you embed Scribd files in your blog. See igeog.
