View PDF files in IFrame with Named Destinations

Question

We've got an application that displays PDF files in an IFrame at specific Named Destinations. This works well on Windows systems but not Mac. In Safari, with Acrobat, the Named Destination is ignored and the document is displayed at the start.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how we might accomplish the task of displaying this information? Our initial thoughts are to:

1. Convert the PDF to HTML on the fly and display the HTML version in the IFrame
2. Convert the PDF on the page referenced to another format such as PNG etc. and display that in the IFrame
3. Utilize some kind of Java app that allowed us to render the PDF while honouring the Named Destination (not sure if this exists)

Any other ideas on a potential method of better displaying PDF files at Named Destination points that is a little more cross platform?

EDIT: I guess another option is to store the data in XSL/XSLT type format and convert to HTML for veiwing or PDF for saving to the desktop.

Answer 1

Not much help, but I found that alternative ways to display PDF files (other than the Acrobat Reader client) are few and far between. As you say, the commonly accepted way to render PDF's in something that doesn't natively support it seems to be converting it "something else", which is supported (even Acrobat.com does it this way in their Flex client if I remember it correctly).

Even converting the PDF document to other formats may be disappointing - especially if you expect a certain level of quality. It may also introduce server-side performance issues.

I realise this doesn't help anyone much but I'm interested to see if any other suggestions come up. We've dealt with this problem before in the same way, using IFrame controls (but without named destinations) but I'm very much interested in other suggestions/ideas as well.