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How to Embed a PDF Viewer in a Website

By Apryse | 2022 Dec 22

6 min

1. Embed a PDF in a Website Using HTML

Free ✔✔✔

Easy ✔✔✔

Functionality X

PDF is a widely used format and all modern browsers have built-in PDF support. We can take advantage of this by using a few HTML elements to embed a PDF directly in a web page.

Any of the following HTML elements get you started quickly with sharing PDFs:

Anchor
Inline iframe

Use the anchor Element

The easiest way to share a PDF file on a website is by using the anchor <a> element. When clicked, a hyperlink or anchor element takes a user to another location on the same page or to a different website.

<a href="my-file.pdf">My file</a>

Image of an HTML demo for an HTML PDF viewer

Example <a> element and output

In the above example, the href attribute specifies where the file is located. Substitute my-file.pdf with the name of your PDF file.

Use the Inline iframe Element

The <iframe> element is a container for embedding information from other webpages, either as a full page or a widget:

<iframe id="inlineFrameExample" 
    title="Inline Frame Example" 
    width="300" 
    height="200" 
    src="https://website.com/my-file.pdf"> 
</iframe>

Image of <iframe> element and output example

Example <iframe> element and output for an HTML PDF viewer

Limitations: Embedding a PDF Viewer in HTML

While embedding PDFs in web pages using HTML provides a quick and easy strategy for sharing PDFs on a website, these methods have some limits:

Results from using a PDF viewer in HTML vary according to the viewer, which means that the viewing experience is not consistent across users, browsers, and devices. Some viewers are better than others.
Loading is slow, particularly with demanding (long or complex) documents.
Embedded PDFs do not provide data for SEO and analytics.
Users cannot interact with the PDF content programmatically.
Not all browsers support PDF embedding. Desktop browsers have very good support, but support on mobile and tablet browsers is poor. Consequently, your PDFs may not be available to all users.

2. Embed a PDF Viewer in a Website Using an Open Source or Open Source-Based Viewer

Free ✔✔✔

Easy ✔

Functionality ✔

If you need improved PDF viewing and more functionality, such as text searching and selection, as well as zooming — but still want a zero-fee option — consider embedding a PDF viewer in your website over simply embedding PDFs using HTML.

An embedded viewer allows your users to open and view PDF documents directly in the browser, for a seamless user experience.

In this category, open-source software or software based on open source is available to you. For instance:

PDF.js
React-PDF

For more information, see our 2021 JS PDF Library Evaluation on GitHub.

Embed a PDF Viewer Using PDF.js

PDF.js is a free, open source PDF viewer for displaying PDFs in a browser using JavaScript. Developed by Mozilla in 2011, PDF.js is maintained by an open-source community.

A PDF.js-based project offers a quick ramp up for modest functionality requirements, but is not cost-effective if any of the following are true:

The web viewer is heavily relied upon in an organizational setting or commercial website
Feature requirements are advanced
Users expect functionality to grow over time
The UX must be a competitive differentiator
Users expect rendering speed and accuracy
Documents are large and complex

PDF.js was designed as a PDF reader only; therefore, it does not support features that require editing PDFs, such as annotation, page manipulation, and redaction.

Check out this blog and decide is PDF.js is the right fit for your project needs.

3. Embed a PDF Viewer Using a Commercial Solution

Free X

Easy ✔

Functionality ✔✔✔

If you require any of the following, consider a commercial solution such as Apryse WebViewer:

High rendering performance
Rendering accuracy
A reliable and consistent viewing experience on any platform and with 160+ file formats
The ability to interact programmatically with PDFs
Access to hundreds of out-of-the-box features, such as PDF annotations, interactive PDF forms, digital signatures, and more
Completely customizable code

Check out this blog to know whether an open source or proprietary PDF viewer engine is right for your organization or not.

Get Started with Apryse WebViewer

If you’re ready to embed Apryse WebViewer into your website, start by downloading WebViewer. Dive into the get-started documentation for more detail on installation with your JS framework of choice.

1. Ready your server environment. If you do not have a server, follow these steps:

Create a folder for your project. (This guide assumes your project is called myServer.)
Open a terminal in that folder and execute:

npm install -g http-server

You can now start the server by executing:

http-server -a localhost

The server is hosted on http://localhost:8080.

2. Extract the WebViewer package (WebViewer.zip) into your project directory (/myServer).

3. Create a new index.html webpage in the same project directory and paste this inside:

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html> 
<head> 
  <title>Basic WebViewer</title> 
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" /> 
</head> 

<!-- Import WebViewer as a script tag --> 
<script src='WebViewer/lib/webviewer.min.js'></script> 
<body> 
  <div id='viewer' style='width: 1024px; height: 600px; margin: 0 auto;'></div> 
</body> 
</html>

4. To instantiate WebViewer, add this script to the body after the viewer div declaration from the previous step:

<script> 
  WebViewer({ 
    path: 'WebViewer/lib', // path to the PDFTron 'lib' folder on your server 
    licenseKey: 'Insert commercial license key here after purchase', 
initialDoc: 'https://pdftron.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/pl/webviewer-demo.pdf', 
    // initialDoc: '/path/to/my/file.pdf', // You can also use documents on your server 
  }, document.getElementById('viewer')) 
  .then(instance => { 
    const { documentViewer, annotationManager } = instance.Core; 

     // call methods from instance, documentViewer and annotationManager as needed 
     // you can also access major namespaces from the instance as follows: 
     // const Tools = instance.Core.Tools; 
     // const Annotations = instance.Core.Annotations; 

     documentViewer.addEventListener('documentLoaded', () => { 
     // call methods relating to the loaded document 
    }); 
  }); 
</script>

5. Make sure your server is up and running. If using the server option from step 3, open http://localhost:8080/index.html on your browser. If you already have the page open, refresh the page. You should see WebViewer start up.

For more information on using WebViewer, refer to this guide.

Conclusion

You can embed a PDF viewer in HTML using HTML tags quickly, easily, and at no cost. If “good enough” PDF sharing isn’t enough for your website and organization, consider embedding a PDF viewer directly in your website for more functionality and better viewing experiences, using an open source viewer or a commercial solution.

Check out these resources for more information on all the options we provided in this blog:

We hope you found this blog useful. If you’d like to share your experiences with embedding PDFs in your website, either using an HTML PDF viewer or an embedded PDF viewer, drop us a line. If you’d like to see Apryse WebViewer in action, we have a demo series on YouTube or you can try out the free demo yourself today.