PDF - Rendering To Size With Google Drive
PDF - Portable Document Format - is a file format invented by Adobe Systems, Inc., with the sole purpose of rendering human readable documents on computers and mobile devices that is independent of application software, hardware and operating system.
The usage of PDF has become widespread on the internet as it allows sharing of all sorts of documents with minimal effort, whether they originated on a word processor, spreadsheet or some other specialised application.
All you need to do is convert the finished document to PDF and at the other end read it using a reader such as that freely available from Adobe, called the Adobe Reader. Furthermore, with the current explosion in the popularity of e-books which appear mainly in PDF, the need for applications that manipulate this format has grown with it.
The free Adobe Reader does not allow any changes to be made to the document in itself. If you wished to change the text or image on a PDF document, you'll need a separate application such as the Adobe Acrobat which you'll need to pay for.
Unless that is, you have the original document in a different format which you can change using Microsoft or OpenOffice programs. For instance, if you've written an e-book that is in PDF and you subsequently wanted to change some text, instead of purchasing Adobe Acrobat to do the changes directly on the PDF, you could make the changes in your text then reconvert the document back.
Since 2008, Adobe Systems, Inc., have made the necessary patents to create PDF documents subject of Public Patent License so that other software companies would also be able to create PDF from their applications. So now, there are many freely available print drivers available that "print" a non-PDF document to a PDF document. In the latest versions of the popular word processor applications such as those from Microsoft and OpenOffice, there are now inbuilt buttons to easily output PDF documents.
Increasingly these days, there is the need to render PDF documents on web pages. On the WordPress platform there are free Plugins which accomplish this task easily.
However, I came across an issue where not only did I wish to render a document on a web page but wanted to do only a part of it. I found an elegant solution to both these issues with Google Drive.
PDF - Manipulate With Google Drive
Since 2007, Google has provided a form of "software on demand" service known as Google Docs that was freely available to anyone. In April 2012, Google Drive was introduced which encompassed Google Docs together with improved storage facility. In order to manipulate a document such as a PDF, it must first be uploaded to Google Drive where many tools are available to change the document. The drive also provides the platform for sharing and collaborating on documents online and in real- time.
Steps To Take With The PDF
1. Once you've downloaded Google Drive (please click on the Google Drive logo on the right to go to the download page), drop the PDF file you wish to manipulate into the drive folder.
2. Click on the file once which will open it in a window.
3. Go ahead and click on the Print icon.
4. Choose which pages of the PDF document to save.
5. Save the new document on Desktop or where you can find it for the next step.
6. Drop the new document into the Google Drive to enable sharing if you so wished and to generate the embed code for the web page.
PDF - Render On Web Page
This is as simple as clicking on "File" then choosing "Embed This PDF File... " and copying the code to the web page where you wish to render the document.
This is how the final result looks. A perfectly rendered document on a web page.
So there you have it. Hopefully, you found this solution straightforward and simple in rendering the PDF pages you need on a web page.
Good luck!