PDF Support

[wakewatcher]

Is the forum search broke? I did a search for 'pdf' and turned up empty. I'm trying to figure out how to embed pdf content into a page. I can, of course, set an external link but then that flings me out of cmsms and off to parts unknown (dropbox in my case) where the pdf is stored. Is there a way to have a page display pdf content or if not is there a way for the link can bring the content into the page frame so as not to lose context of cmsms?


Just installed 1.11.4

[Dr.CSS]

The reading or showing of PDFs in a browser are browser dependent, none will just show the content of a PDF in a page on it's own, I use Foxit Reader and it will show them in the browser but never in the page, it would have to be copied into the page content...

Have you ever seen a web site that did what you ask..?

[faglork]

Is there a way to have a page display pdf content or if not is there a way for the link can bring the content into the page frame so as not to lose context of cmsms?

You can use Google Docs to display the file - not just PDF, a whole bunch of formats! - in an IFRAME:
http://cms.faktori.de/gdocs.html

hth,
Alex

[wakewatcher]

Excellent. I think this is the method I've seen used before (and it seems to work.) I made a page using:

Code: Select all

<__iframe src="http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://example.com/mypdf.pdf&embedded=true" style="width:640px; height:624px;" frameborder="0"></__iframe>

and it did what I wanted. Thanks!

Now for a follow up question. This looks like a good opportunity for me to learn how to integrate something like this into a template so that my content providers don't have to insert this code fragment into the content section. Is there a smarty (or cmsms template creation) for dummies?

[Dr.CSS]

If you are going to have a lot of them like this you may want to use a module like Listit2...

[wakewatcher]

So this approach works with Firefox and Chrome but IE pukes and tells the user "This content cannot be displayed in a frame" claiming the "publisher of this content does not allow it to be displayed in a frame." Any work around for this? (Other than the obvious "Don't use IE. )

[calguy1000]

Some simple googling helps.

I found this in just a few seconds.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1244 ... -vs-object

BTW. If your users are going to be embedding PDF's into pages
you could use a GCB to wrap the cruft. something like:

{global_content name='embed_pdf' file='path/to/file.pdf'}

and the GCB could read the params and output the appropriate <embed> or <object> or <__iframe> tags.

[wakewatcher]

That all supposes you know what to google for. I seem to be google search term impaired. But truth be told I did google and found the original solution on stackoverflow.

Thanks for the tip on Global Content Blocks. I'll dig into those next.

This is like taking a drink with a fire hose. Thanks for your patience.

[rotezecke]

params for GCB?

[wakewatcher]

@calguy
Thanks for the tip. It turns out that I think the problem isn't object or embed related but IE doesn't want to put something it believes to be someone's elses content in an iframe. I got the object stuff to work with FF and Chrome but like the way the google viewer displayed better. But I took to the opportunity to learn a bit more about UDTs and got half way there. So thanks for that. I made a UDT called embed_pdf as:

Code: Select all

if(!preg_match("/MSIE|iPad/", $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]))
 echo "<__iframe style='width: 640px; height: 624px;' src='http://docs.google.com/gview?url=" . $params['file'] . "&embedded=true' frameborder='0'></__iframe>";

else

  Echo "Window's IE will not display pdf content on this page nicely. <a href=" . $params['file'] . ">Click to display content in new page</a><br /><br />(Doesn't work on iPad yet either.)</object></p> <p><strong><object>This works as advertised with Firefox or Chrome.</strong></object> ";

(It doesn't display well on the iPad either so this is the stop gap for now.) In the pdf page I invoked the udt as: {emb_pdf file='path.pdf'}

So as mentioned this is the half step as it seems pretty silly to parse the user agent string on every page request that has a pdf in it. So the next thing I need to run into is how, for instance, on loading the 'home' page I can parse the user agent once then read it when I need it. I tried making an udt as:

Code: Select all

$agent = ($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]);
if (preg_match("/MSIE|iPad/", $agent)) 
{
    $result = "true";
} else {
    $result = "false";
}
$is_ie=$result;
$smarty->assign('is_ie',$is_ie);

and put it in my home page. Then in my other pdf pages tried putting in {$is_ie} to see if it had access to the smarty assignment from the earlier home page visit. It didn't seem to. If it did (or when I figure out how to access it I will use it as a parameter for the embed_pdf UDT. (Or I guess I could really kludge it and use session variables. Probably not a good idea.)