We have a free online PDF to HTML5 converter that you can try for yourself, and for more demanding requirements, we offer a commercial solution that you can build into your product. You can also add interactivity and build solutions that interact with the content in new ways.Īs a developer, instead of a black box that you have no control over, now you can now interact with the content as it if is HTML… because it is! By converting the PDF file to HTML, you can provide a consistent experience no matter what device is used. Different user experience on every device.Black box, cannot interact with the PDF content programmatically.Slow (imagine downloading the whole website just to view one page?).This is important if you want to control what the user sees when the PDF cannot be rendered! Pros and cons of embedding PDF files this way? Pros I have chosen the tag as the winner because it is the only tag where Chrome on Android used the fallback content provided. You should do your own testing using the code example above. For example, Chrome on Android displayed its own fallback content for the and tags. In reality, browsers may ignore the fallback content. In fact, the tag is the only one that does not support fallback content at all. Embed a PDF in HTML without downloading it and using third-party plugins. Officially, the tag (contained within the tag in the example above) is not part of the specification. The inner tags tell the browser what to render if they don’t know how to handle the source file or filetype that you have provided. Notably, Chrome on Android does not display the PDF, and Safari on iOS only displays the first page of the PDF file. Desktop browsers have very good support, but support on mobile and tablet browsers is poor. You can learn more about the history from this helpful MDN article: From object to iframe - other embedding technologies Do all browsers support PDF embedding? The tag was non-standard until it was adopted by the HTML5 standard.
These days, browsers no longer allow this type of plugin for security reasons. In those days, an was for other HTML pages, and the tag was for system applications to take over the rendering. This dates back to the days of Java Applets and Flash. Each behaves similarly, but which is best? And is there a better way? Code Examples The, and tags can all display a PDF file inside a web app. There are several HTML tags that can be used to view PDF files in HTML.