Placing a PDF file on a page

[Guest Dchall8]

This might be a lame question (I don't write web pages for a living). My client has always gotten pretty hefty reports by FedEx. I am suggesting that I submit a CD to him with the contents of the report on the CD in HTML. The report is a cover letter with an outline of the attachments. The attachments are what drive up the page count. I might have from 5 to 500 pages in attachments. I scan them with Adobe Acrobat Pro so they are pdf files. What I want to do is create a HTML doc with navigation links to the PDF files. Rather than open the PDFs in a new window, I'm wanting to open them to the right of the navigation area of the page. And there might be a third "column" to the right of the PDF. A couple years ago I would have created a table and targeted the center cell for the PDF but that application of tables seems to be forbidden anymore. I have a pretty good handle on CSS and have created a sample page with CSS columns. Now how can I target the center of the page for the PDF? Here's the pertinent CSS .content { position: relative; width: auto; min-width: 120px; margin: 0 210px 20px 170px; border: 1px solid black; padding: 10px; z-index: 3;}#navleft { position: absolute; width: 128px; top: 20px; left: 20px; font-size: 0.7em; border: 1px dashed black; padding: 5px; z-index: 2;}#navright { position: absolute; width: 168px; top: 20px; right: 20px; border: 1px dashed black; padding: 10px; z-index: 1;}Then I do a (div class="content") Content (/div) to create and end the center content boxes.

[aspnetguy]

You could always place an iframe in the center column and target the pdf to the iframe.

[justsomeguy]

Also keep in mind that PDF really isn't embeddable content. There are browser plugins to view it with various browsers, but unless you can guarantee the client has that installed it's probably not something you want to count on. I don't use any PDF plugins myself, I hate the Acrobat reader, it's a bloated and poorly-designed piece of software. When I click a PDF link I get an Open/Save dialog and open it in Foxit Reader. Foxit starts immediately, and the software itself is a single executable, there's no installation necessary. The download is less than 1MB. It sort of makes you wonder what Adobe's justification is for having a reader that requires a 20MB download, another 10 minutes to decompress the setup files, "up to 90MB available hard drive space" for Windows (apparently it requires 330MB on HP-UX) and still wants to load every single DLL on your system when it starts up, and all just to read a document.