Is there some way to preview documents in browser? Specifically in say an iframe within a page, as opposed to opening the doc in a new tab? I have a list of files of any type and when a user clicks on one, want to open it in a readonly format. If that file is a video or audio file, that's easy enough, but I'd like to be able to also do pdfs, word docs, maybe excel. Preferably it would be in a cross browser friendly way but if I need to do detection for a plugin (I've seen Google Docs Viewer for FF) I can live with that.
UPDATE:
ShaneC's answer is great and will work well in general. The one hitch I see is that for html5 devices (think ipad), I need to convert the document into a series of images. Is there any way for me to do this in an automated fashion? I need to be able to do this automatically when a new document is uploaded.
Is there some way to preview documents in browser? Specifically in say an iframe within a page, as opposed to opening the doc in a new tab? I have a list of files of any type and when a user clicks on one, want to open it in a readonly format. If that file is a video or audio file, that's easy enough, but I'd like to be able to also do pdfs, word docs, maybe excel. Preferably it would be in a cross browser friendly way but if I need to do detection for a plugin (I've seen Google Docs Viewer for FF) I can live with that.
UPDATE:
ShaneC's answer is great and will work well in general. The one hitch I see is that for html5 devices (think ipad), I need to convert the document into a series of images. Is there any way for me to do this in an automated fashion? I need to be able to do this automatically when a new document is uploaded.
Share Improve this question edited Sep 3, 2011 at 17:47 Endophage asked Sep 2, 2011 at 23:07 EndophageEndophage 21.5k13 gold badges61 silver badges93 bronze badges3 Answers
Reset to default 6You'll want to integrate a cross-browser cross-type document viewer. Google will give you some good sites, personally I've had good experiences with Flex Paper.
For demos, see here: http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/demo/
There is another approach that can be used to view images/pdf/xlsx/docx etc.
You can use iframe and google's gview in the following way:
const YOUR_URL = https://calibre-ebook.com/downloads/demos/demo.docx;
<iframe
className="doc"
src={`https://docs.google.com/gview?url=${YOUR_URL}&embedded=true`}
/>There is the Javascript ViewerJs. An open source tool which allows a website to display PDF and open standard for office documents. It will display the documents inline and without browser plugins.