CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pdfcoldfusioncfpdf
Clark
Clark

Reputation: 63

Displaying the contents of a PDF file on the page using Coldfusion

I have a page that is dedicated to the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). I want this page to show the the SOP in the page with a download button above it (and for Admin an upload button). Basically I want the user to be able to read the SOP without having to download it. I have the buttons sorted and I almost have the display set, but the format is off.

The admin can upload a PDF of the current SOP. That file then gets stored and overwrites that last upload. I tried using cffile but it was unreadable no matter what charset I tried to use. Currently I am taking the file and extracting it as a .txt, then using cffile to read it to a variable that I then output to the screen. It sort of works, but the formatting is all wrong.

I know I can use cfcontent and just have the page be the PDF, but I'd rather not have to mess with adding a new page just for admins to upload new SOP files. (The way the site is built it would have to be a new page)

<cfpdf
action="extracttext"
source="D:\file_path\SOP.pdf"
overwrite="true"
honourspaces="true"
type="string"
useStructure="true"
destination="D:\file_path\SOP.txt">

<cffile
action="read"
file="D:\file_path\SOP.txt"
variable="dcnSOP">

...


<cfoutput>#dcnSOP#</cfoutput>

Basically I'm getting a block of unformatted (as in spaces and new paragraphs) text. It's the text I want, and It's on the page where I want it. But it looks terrible. It seems to just be getting rid of any new line characters and just presenting the text in a blob. Is there a better way of doing this without just having the whole page be the PDF using cfcontent?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2800

Answers (1)

Clark
Clark

Reputation: 63

Thanks to @Miguel-F and @Ageax for the suggestions and leading me to a question I missed on here when I was searching for the answer.

<embed src="\file_path\SOP.pdf" width="800px" height="2100px"/>

This works with every browser but Chrome (our clients will not be using mobile browsers). I know you can use Google's PDF reader to get around this, if anyone is interested in that here is an example of that given by @Script47 here:

 <embed src="https://drive.google.com/viewerng/
viewer?embedded=true&url=http://example.com/the.pdf" width="500" height="375">

Upvotes: 3

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