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How to Embed a Document as a Self-Running
Slideshow in a Website or Blog
Introduction
A self-running slideshow adds life to a website. Not only does a presentation automatically
paging through its slides attract attention with motion, but it also enables you to present a
greater density of content without sending your visitor to another page and without adding
clutter. Studies have shown that slideshows can provide an edge in capturing attention online,
and some SEO experts tout slideshows as a strategy for building traffic. Just as a looping
slideshow in a kiosk grabs attention at a busy mall or airport, a slideshow in a website makes
people stop and pay attention.
There are a variety of ways to create self-running slideshows. But many are difficult for the
developer or designer to execute, require the visitor to install a plugin or have the right native
application, support only a handful of source media file formats, or entail other compromises.
This paper presents a method for embedding a self-running slideshow that can use as its
source virtually any document: a PowerPoint file, PDF, Microsoft Word file, or almost any other
multi-page file. The show runs natively in most browsers, is easy to design and deploy, and
offers a range of ways to customize the user experience.
The centerpiece of this approach is the cloud-based document viewer Prizm Cloud. When you
use a cloud-based document viewer, you embed a link in an <iframe> or <href> element in your
source code that calls the viewer program on the cloud server and opens the document within it.
The document itself may still reside on your own server, or it may have been uploaded to the
Cloud first, depending on which cloud-based document viewer you choose.
Syntax for Calling the Document into the Slideshow Viewer
No matter which way you choose to present the slideshow viewer within your HTML content, the
critical step is phrasing a URL that points to the viewer program an