I’m having trouble displaying PDF files properly on mobile devices when using a document viewer plugin. The plugin works perfectly fine on desktop browsers, but when I access it from my phone or tablet, the document doesn’t scale correctly and goes beyond the screen boundaries.
I’ve been trying to find a solution that would make the PDF viewer responsive and mobile-friendly. The document should automatically adjust to fit the mobile screen width without requiring users to zoom or scroll horizontally.
Has anyone found a good way to integrate document viewing functionality with jQuery Mobile? I’m looking for something that can handle PDFs and other document formats while maintaining proper mobile responsiveness. Any recommendations for plugins or alternative approaches would be greatly appreciated.
Been down this rabbit hole myself rebuilding our company’s mobile portal. The breakthrough? Stop fighting jQuery Mobile and work with its limitations instead. I ditched the PDF plugin approach and built a two-stage system. First, check if the device can handle native PDF rendering. If yes, serve the original file with CSS transforms to set the initial zoom. If not, fall back to canvas-based rendering with a lightweight library that converts pages to images on demand. The real game-changer was adding touch event listeners that bypass jQuery Mobile’s default handlers - kills that annoying horizontal scroll issue you’re dealing with. Also, set your document container to overflow hidden and use transform3d for hardware acceleration. Makes scrolling way smoother on older Android devices.
had the same issue b4. i started using pdf.js with some custom CSS for mobile, it’s way better than regular plugins. also, make sure to add the viewport meta tag, super important!
Had the same issues building a mobile doc management system last year. What finally worked was ditching iframes completely and converting everything server-side to optimized images or HTML on the fly. For PDFs, I combined server-side rendering with ImageMagick and used Hammer.js for touch gestures. Way better than fighting with desktop plugins that don’t play nice on mobile. Performance was night and day, especially on older phones where PDF plugins love to crash. Also throw in lazy loading for multi-page docs - mobile networks will thank you.
Ditch the PDF viewer plugins - they’re a pain on mobile.
I faced the same issue and took a different route. Instead of fighting jQuery Mobile compatibility, I automated everything.
I use Latenode to catch document uploads and requests. When someone hits a PDF on mobile, it kicks off server-side processing. PDFs become responsive image sequences or clean HTML based on what works best.
The system detects devices, converts formats, and serves the right version automatically. Mobile users get properly scaled content, desktop keeps the original PDFs.
You can add progressive loading for long docs and compress based on connection speed. No jQuery Mobile headaches since you’re serving mobile-native formats.
Best part? When new formats pop up or mobile standards shift, just tweak the automation instead of plugin hunting.
Hit this same issue building a mobile app for legal doc review. Game changer was ditching the idea of making desktop PDF viewers work on mobile. Instead, I went with a hybrid setup - took Mozilla’s PDF.js as the foundation and wrapped it in a custom container that handles viewport scaling on the fly. The trick was catching the PDF rendering before it reaches the DOM and figuring out the best zoom level based on screen width. Had to swap out the default touch handlers too since they clash with jQuery Mobile’s gestures. One thing that saved me tons of debugging time - set the PDF viewer container to position relative instead of absolute. Keeps it from breaking out of the mobile viewport. Bonus: it handles screen rotation smoothly without any extra work.
I’ve been wrestling with mobile PDF viewers for years - most solutions are just band-aids on a broken approach.
The real issue isn’t the viewer. You’re solving this manually when it should be automated. Every time someone uploads a document or mobile traffic changes, you’re back tweaking CSS and testing devices.
You need a workflow that detects mobile document access and converts/optimizes on the fly. I set this up with Latenode to monitor document requests, check user agents, and trigger different rendering based on device type.
Mobile users get responsive HTML or optimized image sequences. Desktop gets the original. It runs in the background handling scaling, format conversion, and progressive loading without touching code.
You can add triggers for automatic thumbnails, compression based on connection speed, or A/B testing different mobile approaches.
No more fighting jQuery Mobile compatibility or hunting for plugins that work everywhere.
honestly just use google docs viewer embed for a quick fix. wrap it in a responsive div and it’ll handle most mobile scaling automatically - no fancy setups or server conversions needed.