The Adobe PDF Embed API provides a simple way for web developers to display PDFs on their web pages. While browsers provide good support for rendering PDFs, they do so in an « out of context » manner that takes over the entire screen. The PDF Embed API however lets you place a PDF within your site’s layout, providing much better control over the position and size of the rendered document. This improved experience also provides deeper integration into the PDF viewer, letting developers listen for events and perform operations on the document. In this article, I’m going to demonstrate a simple, but hopefully really useful example of this.
Imagine a large document covering many pages, for example, a textbook. Your website users, potentially students, could work with the document over many weeks while school is in session. If the document is a few hundred pages long, it would be incredibly useful to remember where they were in the document when they start reading again. While a large PDF may have bookmarks, even then they could only be for chapters or other sections, not the exact page the user last read. Luckily, the Embed API provides a method to help with this. Let’s take a look!
