CODEWITHSUNDEEP
flashpdfwebms-word
mP.
mP.

Reputation: 18266

FOSS Flash based multi file format viewer

Firstly this question has been asked a while back, and given the time there are probably newer options and improvements.

Flash pdf viewer

Googling seems to offer a number of tools that are a combination of executable that converts to a base format and an accompanying viewer.

http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/docs.htm

To make it possible for your users to view your PDF documents without using Acrobat Reader, documents first needs to be converted to the SWF file format. There is a range of available converters, both commercial and free. The following example uses the open source tool SwfTools and can be automated if needed.

This solution does not work well for me as i would like to skip the intermediate step and simply have the flash viewer run in the browser and suck the original file down for display.

I am particularly interested in the well following formats with others a bonus.

I am hoping to avoid using a pdf -> html conversion tool such as itext but it might have to be a last fallback option.

WHY Flash and not HTML ?

Part of the motivation for asking for a Flash based solution is that there does not appear to be any ready to go framework that spits out a HTML form. I was hoping to keep the solution completely browser based. Prompting the user to download and then open in something like Office or free equivalents is not practical or allowed.

What about the Acrobat plugin for PDFs

The primary reason for not taking the easy route and simply making use of a acrobat plugin is many plain suck and they suck hard. They have a tendency to lockup and take out your browser. I know there are some browsers that run things in isolation. This isolation may save other sessions but that still does not solve the problem of the current session.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 740

Answers (2)

anujkk
anujkk

Reputation: 1353

Apart from the stated method of converting the files(doc,ppt,pdf) to an intermediate format(swf) and then display it I don't think there is any other alternative. In my knowledge, no such open source flash viewer exists that can directly display a pdf/doc file without converting it to flash format.

However, is it really necessary to display documents in flash format? Recently, I came across a site fileslap.com that converts these documents into png image and then displays it.

Doc file : http://fileslap.com/20/consultants.doc

PDF File : http://fileslap.com/F/HTML_Cheat_Sheet.pdf

PDF to png conversion can be done using ImageMagick but I have no idea how he is converting doc to png.

The best option right now is to use Google Docs Viewer in your project (https://docs.google.com/viewer) Just upload the file on your site and embed the player in an iframe with source link in this format

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://mysite.com/path/file.doc

Note:You don't need to give google your file. You can keep it at your server or anywhere accessible on net through a url.

Edit: FileSlap is also using Google Doc Viewer. 

<div class="doc"> 
<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://media.dropdo.com.s3.amazonaws.com/20/consultants.doc&embedded=true" width="89%" height="700" style="border: none;"></iframe> 
</div>

Upvotes: 2

blahdiblah
blahdiblah

Reputation: 34021

It's not OSS, but embedding the Google Docs Viewer would get you plenty of document types and skips the intermediate conversion.

Upvotes: 0

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