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July 01, 2008
PDF Widget on Acrobat.com
Many times I’ve seen a link to a PDF document and thought that maybe it contained the information I needed but I didn’t want to wait for the download, or worse yet… I wait for the download and then the file isn’t what I really wanted.One of the cool new features of Acrobat.com (Adobe’s new free hosted services — currently in public beta) allows you to embed a widget directly in your HTML page (like I’ve done below) - to allow you to view the PDF content — inline — in the HTML page before deciding if you want to download it. For example, this file is now 10 MB after I attached the exercise files to the PDF document for convenience.
(Please note: you’ll need Adobe Flash Player installed to view this content)
How do you do this yourself?
- Login to Acrobat.com. If you don’t have an account yet, don’t worry. It’s free - and you just click Sign Up to get started.
- Upload the file you want to make available in your HTML page.
- Select Copy Embed Code from the details pod (Figure 1) or if you are looking at all of your files (figure 2)
just click on the arrow to the right of the file name and select Copy Embed Code from the dropdown.
Figure 1. Document is open 
Figure 2. Viewing all documents - Place the copied link into your html page, similar to this example:
<html><title>Demonstration of using PDF Widget in a Web Page</title>
<body><p>The following is a preview of PDF content hosted on Acrobat.com</p>
<p><object classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000” codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/
shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,115,0” width=”365” height=”500”> <param name=”movie” value=”https://share.acrobat.com/adc/flex/mpt.swf” /> <param name=”quality” value=”high” /> <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”/> <param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”/> <param name=”flashvars” value=”ext=pdf&docId=1826d5f7-ab86-4350-9590-d55c7a18f1c5”/> <embed src=”https://share.acrobat.com/adc/flex/mpt.swf” quality=”high” pluginspage=”http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”365” height=”500” wmode=”transparent” allowFullScreen=”true” flashvars=”ext=pdf&docId=1826d5f7-ab86-4350-9590-d55c7a18f1c5”> </embed> </object></p>
<p>Really cool, right?</p>
</body></html>
And my HTML page looks like this
Figure 3. HTML Example displayed in Safari browser.
Now I can flip through the file, and determine if it is indeed the information I wanted, and then select Download or Share from the menu, and I’m directed to Acrobat.com.
Notice here in Figure 4 that I’m prompted to download (vs. preview) due to the fact that here is additional functionality in this PDF supported on in Acrobat and Reader — that is basically the fact that I’ve attached the exercise files to the PDF document as an attachment.
Figure 4. Message appears when viewing in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader delivers the best experience.
Enjoy!
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Comments
This is very cool. Is there a way to do this without uploading the file to Acrobat.com, perhaps with LiveCycle ES or some AS3 scripting or even some CF8 PDF manipulation? I could really use this functionality on our corporate portal, but I can't go posting the PDF files out on another system outside the network.
[[Engineering says : We don’t currently support this capability outside of Acrobat.com. In order to embed the document into a webpage it needs to be hosted on Acrobat.com. - lori ]]
Lori,
> PDF Widget on Acrobat.com
This PDF Widget on Acrobat.com is really cool. Awesome.
It is great being able to present the PDF on screen, even in fullscreen mode.
I have two questions regarding it.
--1--
When I click on "Menu" I get two entries:
- Download or Share
- About Acrobat.com
Can I opt out and block the "Download or Share" entry?
--2--
When I click on the fullscreen icon at the top right-hand corner, it tells me:
"You must have Adobe Flash Player version 9,0,115,0 or later."
Well, so far so good, but I am using Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta 2.
According to:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/
it is version 10,0,0,536, so it should qualify. I downloaded this public Flash Beta from Adobe Labs:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
It appears to be a bug and I thought you might want to know about this so that the Flash Player team can fix it. Thank you so much!
------
Filipe Martins
McKinley Denali Inc.
[[ Thank you for your feedback.
1) Currently the user cannot opt out and block the Download or Share Entry. I have heard this request from other users as well. Additionally, I've been asked to support the ability to be able to embed a file and only allow the users to view the document online and not allow them to download the document. This functionality is not currently supported.
2) Acrobat.com does not yet support Flash Player 10. We will be supporting this version (Flash Player 10) by the time it is released.
The behavior you've identified has been escalated to our engineering team who will evaluate whether this is in fact a bug -- and if so... if it is part of Acrobat.com or in the pre-release Flash Player 10. ]]
I cannot download Adobe Flash Player. I go in and go through the download process andit says successfully downloaded but it isn't there and when I attempt to play something with it, it once again prompts me to download Adobe Flash Player.
I agree with Jeremy. This would be an invaluable tool for my workplace, which, unfortunately, is a secured research facility. Our central Archives would greatly benefit from the ability to deploy this widget from within our intranet. But only if we could host the full service securely. Adobe Engineers: you have a great product here! Please consider a Secure Enterprise level version.
Gary
And I forgot to ask: Would PDF features such as security, watermarks or low quality only print restrictions affect usage with this Widget?
Awesome widget, but I am in the same boat as the other guys - its useless to me if I can't keep company documents on our own server.