PIFF

PIFF (PDF Inline Formatting Function) is a jQuery plugin that quickly makes any link to a PDF forcefully viewed in a window.

Link soon! Live version is a prototype.

What does it do?

• Loads linked PDFs in either a nice modal window (includes five themes to choose from) or with the browser.
• Removes the need to load stylesheets separately (it does all this on its own).
• Makes everyone around you cream.

How to use it

Before doing anything, you must include jQuery (I could append it to the head with the script. Hmm...) and jquery.piff.js (or the minified version, jquery.piff.min.js) on your page like so

<script language="javascript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="jquery.piff.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Now that that huge achievement is accomplished, we can move right on to the simple shiz.

There are five main options you can set; however, for the window object, refer to the link below:

1. cssDir (default: "css") - the directory the CSS (and related images) for PIFF will be stored.
2. dir (default: "") - a string to prepend before the URL path (i.e., http://www.google.com/DIR/etc/).
3. exceptions (default: null) - a regular expression you can use to exclude certain matching HREFs.
4. modal (default: true) - modal (can be "fancybox" [be sure to include the appropriate files for this], true for colorbox, or false or popup window).
5. theme (default: none) - the name of a theme to load (from the path specified by cssDir). The format of a PIFF theme CSS file is NAME.css. NOTE: don't include .css when specifying this option (i.e., to change the theme to "elegant", you simply set it as such).
6. window (default: false) - an object containing settings for the window to be opened. See this page.

Examples

As simple as it gets (no options specified and without selector [selects all anchor tags whose HREF ends with .pdf]):

$.piff();

Some fun options:

$("a.pdf").piff( {
	
	theme: "sharp"
	
	window: {
		
		height: 300,
		
		onClose: function() { alert("You just ruined my life."); console.warn("I'm hacking your computer."); },
		
		width: 500
		
	}
	
} );

Browser support

• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox 3+
• IE9
• Others as of yet untested (help me out!)

License

Public domain

Acknowledgements

PIFF is a project by Gabriel Nahmias, co-founder of Terrasoft.