Possible quirk with displaying PDF files in qTip (IE 7)

[charles.lane]

My apologies if this is a known issue. I have a page using a number of qTips. I've noticed that when the qTip has diplayied a PDF file (but since moved off the hover), the PDF image flashes momentarily on the screen as the user scrolls the page up/down. If there are several PDFs that have been displayed on the page, they all will flash momentarily when the user scrolls up/down.

My theory is that when the user moves off a qTip, the image remains on the page but covered or set to not display -- and that when the page scrolls up/down, IE has to recalculate what is displayed or not.

I haven't noticed this yet if the display in the qTip is a JPG or html.

Is there a way to mitigate this "quirk?"

Thanks for your help - and your qTip!

[Craig]

PDF's displayed how? This sounds like a rather odd implementation

[kiddailey]

I'll hazard a guess ...

I'm assuming you're relying on the user's browser to have a PDF viewing plugin installed. And if so, it's very like that the flickering is a limitation of the plugin itself that perhaps stems from how/when the OS or browser tells the plugin to repaint its contents. I've seen Flash, Video and JAVA applet plugins also exhibit this behavior, particularly on older hardware, and have even seen websites actually hide the plugin content when you interact with the page to keep it from ruining the experience.

If I'm correct in that the plugin is being used to display the PDFs, be sure to test for the presence of it before adding the PDFs to the page, and present a link to manually download the PDF if they don't have the plugin (eg. similarly to PDFObject).

Good luck!


Craig may think it's odd, but I think "scary" would be a better descriptor given the over abundance of really bad security flaws that are inherent in the PDF technology

[charles.lane]

KidDaily,

You are correct and I agree about your guess as to why the flicker happens. The reason we are trying this out is we've developed a "dashboard" that consolidates status from different parts of our organization into a single display. Users can show html, jpg, and PDFs in thier qTip pop-ups. My code reads a SharePoint list that contains the links and text for the hovers. The page winds up with a lot of qTips but works well except for the PDFs. However, as bad as PDFs are, they display quite well a PowerPoint slide or even multiple slide briefings within the qTip.

Thanks for your help.

Charlie Lane

[kiddailey]

Sounds interesting! I love hearing about all these unique implementations of qTip