If you've ever wanted to share a document with visitors to your website, you should know how to embed a PDF file in a Web page. PDF stands for portable document format. Developed by software company Adobe, it allows users to capture all types of information and save it in document form. Rather than just linking to a PDF file, which enables a user to download it onto their computer, you can embed the file so that other Web elements, such as advertisements, can be displayed simultaneously.
There's a number of third-party websites that house your PDF files in their viewers. The most popular ones that have implemented improved features will be discussed after the jump.
Zoho Docs
Zoho is suite of superb office and productivity applications, among which is a web-based viewer that supports a lot more formats than Google Docs, including but not limited to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, RTF (rich text format) files, as well as OpenDocument text, presentation and spreadsheet files. Unlike the Google Docs Viewer, the Zoho Docs Viewer lets you upload a file you own (which you can publish so it will have a short, shareable URL) or paste the URL in the main page. Once you've uploaded your file and are viewing it online, you can grab the embed code at the Embed tab. There's no required sign-up process.
This viewer doubles up as a handy conversion service, which allows you to convert any of the supported document files to other file types.
Google Docs
For a simple web-based PDF viewer that can also display PowerPoint files, TIFF images, Microsoft Word documents, Google Docs also offers a viewer. If all you're looking for is the document viewer, you don't even have to visit that page. You just need to have published your PDF document so you can get the URL of the stored document and append it to the Google Docs Viewer address at http://docs.google.com/viewer so it just becomes http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=yourURLhere. Since the path also accepts the embed parameter, you can also embed a PDF document viewer in your website with iframes. Just copy the embed code on the Google Docs Viewer page.
Scribd
Scribd is a slightly different breed when it comes to sites that allow document embedding. It is actually a document-sharing website for authors that want to publish their works online. You need to sign up for an account in order to finish uploading documents to Scribd, but once you do, you'll have a beautiful viewer for your piece. Scribd also allows you to import any documents from Google Docs, as well as to create a document from pasted text.
If you're an author and have lots of works you'd like to share or sell, you can use Scribd and other popular document-sharing websites, such as DocStoc, Issuu, YouPublish, edocr (the free account has limited functionality) and YUDU, which really have a sharing focus so your documents can get as exposed as possible.
If you'd rather not use a third-party document viewer, FlexPaper will likely be the best option for you as a website owner.
It is an open-source web-based document viewer that you can download for non-commercial purposes at this website and upload it to your site.
Do you want a desktop software to convert PDF files to stunning Flash or SWF file for embed on your website, you can download Doremisoft PDF to Flash Converter.
