Display Large PDFs with HTML5

Making large documents available online can lead to long wait times and high memory use if the full file is loaded at once. FlowPaper addresses this by splitting documents and loading only visible pages.

This approach also helps when publishing to lower-powered devices with less memory and CPU capacity.

Publishing in split mode is straightforward. FlowPaper 1.4.5 and later includes out-of-the-box scripts for publishing large documents using PHP and ASP.NET. Enable split mode publishing in your configuration to use this workflow.

Publishing large documents manually

If you cannot run PHP on your server, you can still split a document using PDF2SWF by adjusting the conversion command:

C:\SWFTools\pdf2swf.exe Paper.pdf -o Paper%.swf -f -T 9 -t -s storeallcharacters

The % token makes PDF2SWF generate one file per page (for example, Paper1.swf, Paper2.swf, and so on).

FlowPaper detects split mode when SwfFile uses this syntax: {filename[*,padding],total pages}.

Example viewer configuration:

$('#documentViewer').FlowPaperViewer({
  config: {
    SwfFile: "{Paper[*,0].swf,28}",
    Scale: 0.6,
    ZoomTime: 0.5,
    ZoomInterval: 0.1,
    FitPageOnLoad: false,
    FitWidthOnLoad: false,
    PrintEnabled: false,
    MinZoomSize: 0.2,
    MaxZoomSize: 5,
    localeChain: "en_US"
  }
});

FlowPaper was previously named FlexPaper. If you use a version older than 2.4.7, reference FlexPaperViewer instead of FlowPaperViewer.

In this example, the viewer loads 28 pages in split mode with a padding value of 0. Use padding 1 if files are named with leading zeros, such as Paper01.swf, Paper02.swf, and so on.