Introduction

FlexPaper is an open source light weight document viewer component designed to work together with libraries such as PDF2SWF, making it possible to display and interact with PDF files in web pages, Adobe Flex and other Flash based applications.

Making your document ready

To make it possible for your users to view your PDF documents without using Acrobat Reader, documents first needs to be converted to the SWF file format. There is a range of available converters, both commercial and free. The following example uses the open source tool SwfTools and can be automated if needed.

1. Download and install SwfTools. All builds are available for download here.
2. Convert your PDF to SWF. This is preferrably done from the command prompt. Make sure you set your options (Edit->Options) to "No viewer" if you are converting your PDF using the UI from SwfTools before exporting your PDF to SWF. This example converts a PDF file called "Paper.pdf" to the output file "Paper.swf":

   C:\SWFTools\pdf2swf.exe Paper.pdf -o Paper.swf -T 9 -f

   Please see the conversion guide for more details about the conversion and the parameters that are currently recommended.

 

Viewing your document using the pre compiled flash version

The pre-compiled version of FlexPaper is most useful if you just want to use FlexPaper on any of your web pages.

1. Download and extract the pre-compiled version of FlexPaper. All builds are available for download here.
2. The zip file contains a sample file called "index.html" which shows you the basic parameters you need to pass to FlexPaper (SwfFile and Scale). Please see the wiki on Google Code for a complete list of available parameters.
3. Copy the SWF you created with PDF2SWF to the same directory as your extracted files
4. Upload everything to your web site and navigate to FlexPaperViewer.html in your favorite browser. If you on the other hand would like to run the application from a local directory rather than from a web server, then the application has to be added as trusted first. You can do that at Adobe's web site.

 

Using FlexPaper in Adobe Flex

Using the viewer in Adobe Flex is as easy a using the flash version.

1. Download the FlexPaper SWC from Google Code and add the FlexPaper library to your Flex project.
2. Copy the SWF you created with PDF2SWF to your bin-debug directory and add the FlexPaper component to your flex application as in the following example (update the SwfFile property on the component to point to your SWF file):

   <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" width="100%" height="100%" xmlns:fp="com.devaldi.controls.flexpaper.*">
       <fp:FlexPaperViewer width="520" height="450" Scale="0.6" SwfFile="Paper.swf" />
   </mx:Application>