The Linux Daily

Convert PDF to SWF with pdf2swf

I stumbled upon pdf2swf when looking for the best way to embed a PDF into a webpage. It works really well and was easy to compile on my shared hosting account (bluehost.com). I installed using the following steps:

Download – Download version 0.9.1 (visit http://www.swftools.org/download.html for latest)

wget http://www.swftools.org/swftools-0.9.1.tar.gz

Extract – Extract the newly downloaded files

tar xzvf swftools-0.9.1.tar.gz

Configure – Make sure the environment is setup

cd swftools-0.9.1; ./configure

Compile – Getting source to binaries

make config; make

Test Run – You should get a help menu

./src/pdf2swf

Install – Copy the binaries to proper locations on the system
(You won’t be able to run this step if you’re installing on a shared host. If that’s the case, copy the binaries of interest to ~/bin and add ~/bin to PATH variable)

make install

Usage – Run the program (Run man pdf2swf for more info)

pdf2swf myfile.pdf myfile.swf

That’s it! Open the .swf using your browser to see pdf2swf’s handywork.

As a side note, I ended up ditching the .swf method for embedding my document on my website and going with Google’s PDF viewer which is done with the following line of HTML:

<iframe style="width: 700px; height: 900px; border: 0px none;" src="http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://mydomain.com/path/to/myfile.pdf&amp;embedded=true" width="320" height="240"></iframe>