PDF Flipbook Catalogs is a site module that lists the PDF files of a folder – one subfolder per language – with an automatically generated cover thumbnail and opens them in a built-in flipbook viewer based on PDF.js. No external service, no CDN, no cookies, no tracking, no subscription. Price lists and dealer documents can be protected so that only logged-in users can open them.

Flipbook viewer
- Double pages with a page-flip effect (cover shown alone), single pages with swipe on smartphones
- Page overview with thumbnails
- Full-text search in the PDF, e.g. for article numbers, with text snippets
- Zoom with drag-to-pan, fullscreen, PDF download, jump to page, keyboard navigation
- Clickable links from the PDF (web links and jumps within the catalogue)
- Direct links to a page (#page=12)
- Interface in 10 languages (DE, EN, FR, ES, IT, NL, PL, PT, CS, TR)

Module
- Designed for multilingual sites: one subfolder per language with a fallback language – single-language sites can put the PDFs directly into the folder
- Titles are built from the file names, the order is set by a number prefix – nothing to maintain in the backend
- Cover thumbnails generated automatically (Imagick + Ghostscript) and renewed when a PDF is replaced
- Three layouts: List (e.g. sidebar), Grid and Downloads (table with size, date, browse and download buttons – optionally all languages)
- Colour settings: accent colour, toolbar, page background, flip duration
- Per-file settings for a custom title, a description or hiding a file
- Setup notice for administrators if no PDFs are found or the file protection is not effective
- Joomla Update System supported

Protected catalogues
Ideal for price lists, dealer documents or POS material with prices:

• Option “Protect files”: only visitors with the module’s access level (e.g. Registered or a dealer group) can open the PDFs
• Direct links to the files are blocked – the module secures the folder with a .htaccess file, and Joomla delivers PDFs and cover thumbnails only after an access check
• Files are sent with “private” caching and “noindex”, so they are not stored by proxies or indexed by search engines
• Protected catalogues can also be stored outside the web root (recommended on nginx)

Requirements
Joomla 5 or 6, PHP 8.1+. For cover thumbnails: PHP Imagick with Ghostscript (otherwise a placeholder is shown).

The viewer uses Mozilla PDF.js (Apache License 2.0), bundled with the module.