Slide embedding from Commons

Posted on by Luis Villa

A friend of a friend asked this morning:

I suggested Wikimedia Commons, but it turns out she wanted something like Slideshare’s embedding. So here’s a test of how that works (timely, since soon Wikimanians will be uploading dozens of slide decks!)

This is what happens when you use the default Commons “Use this file on the web -> HTML/BBCode” option on a slide deck pdf:

Wikimedia Legal overview 2014-03-19

Not the worst outcome – clicking gets you to a clickable deck. No controls inline in the embed, though. And importantly nothing to show that it is clickable :/

Compare with the same deck, uploaded to Slideshare:

Some work to be done if we want to encourage people to upload to Commons and share later.

Update: a commenter points me at viewer.js, which conveniently includes a wordpress plugin! The plugin is slightly busted (I had to move some files around to get it to work in my install) but here’s a demo:

Update2: bugs are fixed upstream and in an upcoming 0.5.2 release of the plugin. Hooray!

Published by Luis Villa

12 thoughts on “Slide embedding from Commons”

  1. Hi!

    There’s an open source project called ViewerJS[1] that lets you self-host and embed PDFs and OpenDocument files, so you don’t have to use proprietary ‘cloud’ platforms like Slideshare.

    There’s no software ‘installation’ required other than putting the viewer HTML behind a server, because the rendering works client-side in the browser.

    Do pop into #webodf if you’d like some pointers on how to do that. I work on it, so wouldn’t mind helping out. :)

    [1]: http://viewerjs.org/

  2. Aditya- that looks pretty awesome! I’ve added it above, but have some bugs with the plugin – how can I report bugs?

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