I'm implementing some code in C# to send emails in HTML format. I need to be able to embedded images and links to a document which is attached to the mail itself.
I had no big issues with the images. I create an AlternateView, create a LinkedResource for each image, replace the image src with a CID, then add each LinkedResource to the view and that's it. It works, no big deal.
Simplified, something like this:
private void EmbedImage(AlternateView htmlView, string imageFile)
{
LinkedResource inline = new LinkedResource(imageFile, MediaTypeNames.Image.Jpeg);
_htmlView.LinkedResources.Add(inline);
_body.Replace("ImagePlaceholderTag " + imageFile, "cid:" + inline.ContentId);
}
The problem happens if I try to do something similar with a PDF.
Let's say I have a document conditions.pdf. What I need to do is to attach the document to the email and then have an href in the body of the mail that will open the document when clicked.
I can do this easily on a standard HTML page, obviously, so I've tried to apply the same logic I've used for the images with the only difference being:
I use MediaTypeNames.Application.Pdf.
Instead of using the cid: for the src of an img I use it for the href of an <a> tag.
Result: I get a link in the mail, but when I click it the browser tries to open the cid file.
What should I do to obtain the behavior I need?
What I want to archive:
I scanned a transport protocol which has check boxes and text fields on it. I want to be able to display it in an Android app, fill in the needed data digital and make a new PDF (with a transparent background) out the digital added strings and checks (the empty protocol is already pre-printed => I just want to add the data).
What I tried:
I made a fill able PDF in Adobe Acrobat but I'm not able to display it in the app. I tried to embed it into a html file and display it like this (the .html and the .pdf file are both in the "Assets" directory)(the tutorial I followed):
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<h1>TEST</h1>
<embed src="/TransportReport.pdf" width="500px" height="375px">
</body>
</html>
View view = inflater.Inflate(Resource.Layout.TransportReport, container, false);
view.FindViewById<WebView>(Resource.Id.wv_transportReport_id).LoadUrl("file:///android_asset/TransportReport.html");
but I alwas get this error ("TEST" gets displayed):
11-11 21:48:10.183 E/eglCodecCommon( 4135): **** ERROR unknown type 0x0 (glSizeof,72)
11-11 21:48:10.243 E/eglCodecCommon( 4135): glUtilsParamSize: unknow param 0x00000b44
11-11 21:48:10.243 E/eglCodecCommon( 4135): glUtilsParamSize: unknow param 0x00000bd0
And for the second part: Is it possible to extract the filled in data and "convert" it to a new PDF with a blank background? If not, does someone have a better idea how I can solve this?
Thanks in advance for every suggestion/solution.
I want to display the report(pdf) which was available in the webpath assume (http://myservre/reports/myrepoft.pdf). Currently, It was being displayed via IFrame like this.
strReportPDFFile = "`http://myservre/reports/myrepoft.pdf`"
<IFRAME frameborder="1" onload="onchangestate()" src="" id="ifrmShowReport" frameborder="0" height="100%" width="100%" marginwidth="0" align="top" style="overflow: none;overflow-x: auto;display:none"></IFRAME>
document.getElementById("formContainer").style.display = "block";
document.getElementById("ifrmShowReport").style.display = "block";
document.getElementById("ifrmShowReport").src = strReportPDFFile;
The URL was displaying in the address bar which I want to hide URL. Is it possible ? If not, please suggest some better alternative.
I argue that the main reason of your question (hiding the URL of the PDF file) is for security issues.
E.g. you have some PDF files on your server that have to be sent and read only from intended audience and not from everybody.
I give you some basic hints on how to realize this intent:
place the PDF files out of the public root of your webserver
realize a server side script that:
check is the user is authenticated and have the grant to get the file
get some parmeters to retrieve the correct file
serve the file with this server side script content-disposition (as attachment, sending the correct Mime-Type and a "ficticious" URL)
Since you put C# in your question tags i address you on
Add a content-disposition to the header with C#:
Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", #"attachment;filename=""MyFile.pdf""");
Then you can display your pdf wherever u wish: blank page, iframe ...
It is sure you'll not find a solution just working with HTML/Javascript, not one of those easly to avoid for a medium level internet user.
I am dealing with a situation where I should change the font of a HTML body in C sharp using a stylesheet.
I have added a stylesheet to my project with name Stylesheet1.css which contains the code to change the font of a HTML body.
body {
font-size: 10px;
}
I need to reference this stylesheet in source code, where I am processing the HTML body.
I am processing the HTML body as follows.
if(some condition)
{
mail.HTMLBody= ? ? ? ? ;
}
I need to reference the stylesheet in this part. How can I do this?
I would not use external stylesheets for emails. As alot of email clients do not support it.
See http://groundwire.org/support/articles/css-and-email-newsletters
and
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssemail/
As some clients like hotmail remove the 'body' tag all togeather so your example in your question will not work. So you can instead wrap your email in a DIV and use inline styles so you get best support for all email clients.
A list of what is supported by which client is here http://css-discuss.incutio.com/wiki/Style_In_Email
Edit
You should be able to set the font-size like this
<div style="font-size:10px;">
your email content here
<p style="font-size:14px;">
some bigger text
</p>
</div>
I agree with Daveo's answer - you are best off embedding styles directly rather than linking out to an external CSS
There is a very, very extensive matrix of styles & features that are and aren't supported by the popular email apps (outlook/gmail/yahoo mail/etc) at http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
http://htmlemailboilerplate.com/ is a really good starting point for getting html and css right in emails.
Here are the requirements, the users needs to be able to view uploaded PDFs in the browser. They need to be able to add notes to the PDF and save the updated PDF to the server without having to save it to their machine and open it outside the browser.
Any ideas on how to achieve this are welcomed.
by the way I am working with an asp.net website (in C#).
I have no control over what the pdf looks like. It is uploaded client-side then other users need to view and an notes on top of the pdf.
The solution that I was thinking is to render the PDF to a jpeg and use javascript to plot coordinates of where the note should go.
here is a quick example of the html and javascript that create the json of note (using jQuery.)
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title></title>
<style type="text/css">
*
{
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
#PDF
{
position:absolute;
top:0;
bottom:0;
width:600px;
height:800px;
background:url(assets/images/gray.png) repeat;
float:left;
}
#results
{
float:right;
}
.comment
{
position:absolute;
border:none;
background-color:Transparent;
height:300px;
width:100px;
overflow:auto;
float:left;
top:0;
right:0;
font-family: Arial;
font-size:12px;
}
div.comment
{
padding-top:-20px;
}
.comment a.button
{
display:block;
padding-top:-20px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<div id="PDF"></div>
<div id="results">
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
<script type="text/javascript" src="script/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var points = [];
$("#PDF").click(function(e) {
if ($("textarea.comment").length == 0) {
var that = this;
var txt = $("<textarea class='comment'></textarea>").css({ top: e.pageY, left: e.pageX }).blur(function() { $(this).remove(); }).keypress(function(e2) {
if (e2.keyCode == 13 && !e.shiftKey) {
var that2 = this;
$("#PDF").append($("<div class='comment'>").html(that2.value.replace(/\r/gi, "<br>")).css({ top: e.pageY, left: e.pageX }));
$(this).remove();
points.push({ "x": e.pageX, "y": e.pageY, "text": that2.value })
$("#results").append('{ "x": ' + e.pageX + ', "y": ' + e.pageY + ', "text": "' + that2.value + '" }<br/>');
}
});
$(this).append(txt);
txt.each(function() { this.focus(); })
}
});
</script>
So now I need to figure out how to:
Render a pdf to jpeg.
Recreate the PDF putting the annotations on top on it.
You can use GhostScript to render a PDF to JPEG.
Command line example:
gswin32c.exe -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=jpeg -r300 -sOutputFile=output.jpg input.pdf
You need to call GhostScript via the command line version (as above) or use a wrapper.
A Google search turned up this blog post:
A Simple C# Wrapper for Ghostscript
For creating a new PDF you have two main alternatives:
Modify the JPEG and convert the JPEG into PDF (you can use GhsotScript for the conversion)
Use A PDF library that imports your original PDF and add data on top of that
For PDF libraries see this SO question:
Building PDF Files with C#
My company, Atalasoft, provides components that let you view document images, including PDFs and annotate them and save the annotations back into the PDF. In our product suite, you would need dotImage document imaging and the PDF Reader add-on. You would be using dotAnnotate through our AJAX web controls. Here is a link to our online demo - the document displayed is a TIFF, but you could use a PDF too.
I don't think you will be able to have a user load a pdf in their browser, edit it, then save it to the server without them saving it to their machine and then uploading it to the server.
What you can do is setup a webform with a database backend that can represent the pdf, and when they edit it you can regenerate the PDF using itextsharp and loading the information from the database, that way when the user goes back to edit the PDF you can prepopulate the form with what already exists.
itextsharp is extremely easy to use, here is an example:
string sourceFile = "path/to/pdfTemplate.pdf";
PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(sourceFile);
PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileStream("path/to/store/pdf/filename.pdf", FileMode.Create));
AcroFields fields = stamper.AcroFields;
//now assign fields in the form to values from your form
fields.SetField("input1", input1.Text);
fields.SetField("input2", input2.Text);
//close the pdf after filling out fields
stamper.SetFullCompression();
stamper.FormFlattening = true;
stamper.Close();
then if you wanted to show the actual PDF you could easily
Response.Redirect("path/to/store/pdf/filename.pdf");
We do this using lowagie on a Spring/Java platform.
Users are presented with pre-generated sales tax returns and can add certain manual adjustments in a few fields. We then recompute totals fields based on their manual input and save the whole thing back to our DB.
You can use either PDFSharp or itextsharp to create annotations. Haven't tried PDFSharp annotation but iTextSharp does work. You'll have to handle the editing on the server side. probably copy the file to a temp folder edit it and save it back.
You'll find itextsharp at http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net, annotation example: bottom at the page http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ch03.html
pdfsharp: http://www.pdfsharp.net
If you are able to buy a third party library I'd pretty much recommend TxTextControl. http://www.textcontrol.com/en_US/
With this control you can write an editor, that lets you use your pdf as a template and allows the user make changes and save them. All within the browser, without the need to manually select a tempfile on the computer. Acessing is pretty much like using the TextProperty of a normal TextBox.
You did not specify what technology limitations you have. If you can consider a Silverlight solution, and you have client computers that support Silverlight, you can easily do this.
Take a look at how Microsoft Sketchflow works, it permits the user to annotate documents in the web browser and the annotations are persisted back to the server.
Here is a company with a commercial control to annotate PDF (and other formats).
Microsoft does this in their Sketchflow player. Here is a video. Of course you would not be using sketchflow but rather implimenting something similar that meets your needs.
As an added bonus Silverlight 4 supports the clipboard as well as drag and drop so that end users could paste something onto the PDF immage as well as drag any file onto it ehich you would then be able to upload to your server.