Hi! I am currently looking if it's possible to display word documents and pdfs inside flash movie in web browser. I tried looking all around, and found that you can create archives on data streams with action script, but I haven't found anything about embedding. Is it possible? Is it cross-platform or available only through proprietary solutions like COM? Where should I look next?

For what specific purpose do you want to do this? Word documents and PDF files are both binary files, and I'm not sure offhand how to read binary files in a flash program (or even whether it's possible), but assuming you can in theory you could make a loader and renderer. In all likelihood, though, this would be a lot more trouble than it's worth. An easier solution might be to simply export the Word and PDF files to something more usable. Apparently Adobe Illustrator can even make a SWF from a PDF file and I'm sure that there are other free ways of doing it.

What solution is the most reasonable depends of course on why you want to do this and who is going to be using it.

The idea is to make flash based front-end that would allow to interact with document repositories. But I cannot find a proof it's even doable.

EDIT: ouch, sorry, very wrong forum, can someone please fix it to General Programming :(

yes