Your Users Hate Viewing PDFs Online. Here’s Some Alternatives.

You've got a lot of information in PDF files you need to get on the web. You don't really want to use PDF for pretty obvious reasons, such as:

User accessibility issues
Users unwillingness to install a PDF reader
Slow internet connections and PDF loading times
Use of assistive technologies that do not support PDF.

So how do you get around hosting PDF files on your web pages but still get the information across in the same format? Here's a list of services and ideas that will get you headed in the right direction.

Free Online Services – No Need to Pay

Buzzword

Adobe Buzzword and Share
Adobe, the original creator of PDF, actually has been thinking about this and has decided to help. They have the Buzzword service which gives you unlimited web storage for online document sharing and collaboration. Buzzword is free and allows you to share and collaborate with other Buzzword users. If you want to share with those who don't have Buzzword accounts this simply won't work.

However, Adobe has also been hard at work on Share, a free file sharing service offering up to 5GB of space and public as well as restricted access documents. The really cool thing that they did with Share is that they built a Flash based document preview application that you can embed into your web pages which means anyone with Flash can see the documents.

Google Labs

Google Labs – Google Docs
The web gurus at Google Labs have never been behind the curve when it comes to sharing and online collaboration of documents and have offered Google Docs for some time. While it is still in beta, it is extremely stable and functional. With Google Docs you can again create or upload documents of all sorts and then share them through the use of a unique URL.

The service offers What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing of documents and allows you to create spreadsheets and presentations as well. Unfortunately, the service doesn't handle PDFs extremely well but you can still convert or export that PDF to a format Google Docs knows and supports.

Scribd

Scribd – Upload, Share, Explore

Another online document sharing service in the mix is Scribd, which defines itself as a self-publishing platform that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover documents of all kinds.

Scribd converts documents to what it calls iPaper can be embedded in your pages and is about 100Kb in size and doesn't require any additional software.

Scribd's iPaper also has built in security and maintains some features of PDFs including:

Full text search
Copy/paste functionality
View modes
Zoom

The service supports the following formats: PDF, PS, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPS, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, ODT, SXW, ODP, SXI, ODS, SXC, OpenDocuments, TXT and RTF.

Docstoc

Docstoc – Find and Share Professional Documents

Docstoc is another service providing a way to share documents online and embedding them into your web pages. There is unlimited file space available allowing you to upload an unlimited amount of documents.

You can also keep the documents private or share them with the world. Docstoc provides widgets and APIs for their flash player which allows you to embed your documents in a web page allowing anyone with Flash to see them.

Currently the service isn't as robust as Scribd and can only handle DOC, PDF, XLS, PPT, PPS, and TXT.

Popular Pay Services
Some corporate or business user may be looking for more out of their online document sharing service and that's where the pay services come in. Each offers different options and features but in the end it's all about document creation and collaboration in a more secure online environment.

Here are some of the more popular pay services.

4Shared.com with prices ranging from $5-10 a month.
WebEx WebOffice – Cisco is in the mix with Webex. Aimed at mostly at companies with the lowest rate being $59.95 a month for only 5 members.
ThinkFree – An online office suite as much as a document sharing platform. Free and pay services available.

Do-It-Yourself:
The most basic is to take the original document, since most PDFs are made from other formats like Word or Excel, and change it into an HTML file. Many versions of Office and other productivity suites allow for the export of files into HTML files.

One of the best applications around to do this is Able2Extract which can even keep the formatting in place with CSS and HTML. This means the information is available to everyone with a web browser including mobile phone users who might have only a WAP browser or not have a Flash or JavasScript enabled web browser.

The Wrap:
An army of online document sharing services can be found by doing a Google search on "upload documents free" or "upload files free" with a little work and some searching you'll find exactly what you need.

No longer do you need to force your users and viewers to wait long to see your documents. No more hosting PDF files directly on your site. With online document sharing and embedding technologies maturing rapidly you'll be able to show everyone those content rich documents with a simple embed code and a little work.

Of course you can always resort to simply converting the file to HTML and put it directly into your web pages as well, but who wants to do all that work when there are all these other options?