It is incredible just how much information we have today stored in PDF format. According to the PDF Association, approximately 2.5 trillion PDFs are created every year, making up 6 percent of the web. As a web developer, though, PDFs aren't always the most outstanding experience online:
- Viewing experiences vary significantly across different users and devices because they depend on a PDF viewer. Whether it is embedded in web browsers or free online libraries, some viewers are better than others. Adobe Acrobat Reader is generally the universal standard for viewing PDFs properly. Google Chrome is also very common. However, many things have worked in Acrobat that still doesn't work or render correctly in Chrome.
- It becomes difficult for me to be able to incorporate PDFs into the rest of my website. Most often, PDFs would prompt users to download PDFs on their devices.
- Converting PDFs to HTML is complicated and unreliable. If I want to present content inside a webpage that is in PDF format, I might often flatten it to PDF to make it easier to embed.
- I have no visibility into how my visitor is viewing those PDFs. This means that I have no idea if someone is reading certain pages, how long they spend on those pages, etc.
Fortunately, Adobe PDF Embed is an excellent solution to solve all of these challenges.