How do I display PDFs in browsers without Acrobat plugin

Question

If similar question has been already posted, I am sorry for the duplicate.

Our intranet site has links to a lot of pdfs. But most of our users dont have pdf plugin installed. So they couldn't see any of these files.

Installing pdf plugins for the browsers in their machines has been ruled out. we dont know why, but it might be some security reasons. We have been asked to convert the entire list of pdfs to look-alike htmls.

Now i am looking for these options.

1. Find a software that perfectly mimics the pdfs to the corresponding html files.(all kinds of pdfs are there, like user manuals,product catalogs, statistical reports etc).
2. Somewhat write a code to display pdfs inside a browser. May be like scribd. i think scribd is using flash. i dont think Our intranet users allowed to install flash plugin either. If this can be done in .NET, it is much preferred.
3. Manually convert all those pdfs(around 200 files,they will be adding more) to HTML files.

Experts, please light up my life. :)

Answer 1

I think it would be understandable to prevent ActiveX plugins from being loaded on the browser as that would speed up the browsing experience and not to destabilize the browser by memory hogging plugins (Adobe is imho, an example of such). Also due to the recent flaws found in the PDF which would enable a malicious user to arbitrarily control a PC by way of script embedding within the PDF.

Would this Pdf2Html do? This is found on Sourceforge by the way.

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.

Answer 2

You could always use an applet. IceSoft, JPedal and Qoppa all offer this.

Answer 3

You could convert the PDFs into either images or HTML. Images would generally be more accurate (look more like the original PDF) but HTML would of course be more interactive. You didn't mention if you're looking for a commercial tool or an open source one, but we at www.pdfonline.com offer commercial tools that do both types of conversions if you're interested. Cheers

Answer 4

Come across this the other day, and it seems to do what you want and also retain the document as PDF at your end which will make management of files much easier (rather than conversion or dealing with thousands of html files)

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/webforms/aspnetpdfviewer.aspx?msg=3232467

Seems like an awesome user control! I haven't had chance to try it out myself, but very keen to know your feedback on this too.

Answer 5

hi,

using swftools, you can create flash files out of pdfs(man page). probably that kind of library scribd uses.