Pdf on web page: best solution

Question

Hi,

I need to include pdf files in some webpages, and I'm gettin' in troubles. The app is a simple newspaper's archive, in which i can read right on page or download as pdf files, one file per page. What my customer can provide me is one pdf file for each page; what my customer wants from me is to navigate them in indexes (with page thumbnail) and have a read from a choosen one direcly in page; I'm using php/mysql.

I started trying out to use the <object> tag with type="application/pdf", but i found it's deprecate 'cause it's not crossplatform at all (there's no support on linux's browsers, but even my windows' firefox 3.5 couldn't show me anything).

I guessed I could transform that pdf in something different (html or simply images are good enough), but the only thing i found is ImageMagick, that I cannot use as I must install on server and I can't, as I'm not admin of that machine.

So, I'm finally looking for suggestions

Thanks

Answer 1

Display the pdf inline using an IFRAME. The thumbnail you can generate with imageMagik. You should be able to use the command line version of ImageMagik to resize and convert to jpg.

edit

Your best bet is to talk to the server admin and have them install php support for ImageMagik then you can use it as a class.

If you can't get support to install on the server, you will have to use the command line version.

You might be able to Google around for a library that wraps the command line, but it would be trivial to write it yourself.

With this in place you can create a large readable black and white png for each page. It should click through to the pdf.