I'm looking for a way to display a PDF (similar to a picture box), in a Windows Form. After that I need to be able to create a PDF. What's the best library for the job for creating the PDF (from simple text)? I've taken a look at several and I'm not sure which one is the best. Preferably open source. As for the control, I tried the COM object Adobe provides... I can't seem to get it working. At all. I've tried loading several files, there are no errors. It simply fails to load.
PDF Sharp, Sharp PDF and iTextSharp are excellent. They are all OpenSource.
To answer your question about getting the PDF to render, you could use a WebBrowser Control on your form as long as the client workstation has Adobe Reader installed. The browser will automatically pick up the MIME type and load the in-browser Adobe Reader.
For rendering, I echo Will Marcouiller and SLaks. We have had good success with PDFSharp.
For creating pdf's iTextSharp is very good, and it's free too.
I worked with SharpPDF and it did great job. And it's open source.
Related
I'm looking for the best way to display pdf document on a website. Surely I need to convert it to jpeg or gif for the browser to handle it. I read few posts but most refer to GhostScript and its pdf2image. But that solution calls for starting a process that would save a copy of pdf doc to the file system and then would have to be loaded back into memory for displaying. Frankly I find it a bit clumsy. For those of you who have done it, what library you used and if you could attach a link to some examples, I'd greatly appreciate it.
I'm developick a web application that helps manage manufacturing process and is accessed fron android tablets. Company has a stockpile of documentation in pdf files that is to be delivered to production managers. I'd love the solution to be akin Crystal Report Viewer contron but I I understand that I have to stick to pdf to image conversion. Please give me some advise here.
My advice is don't over think this.
You can simply add a link to the PDF file, which will open on a new tab.
You can take a look at http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ which will allow you to render a PDF on the client side.
Or if you decide to go with a Ghostscript, you can take a look at http://ghostscriptnet.codeplex.com
By all accounts the PDF Focus .NET library seems to be the best solution. A wrd of advice is to add a cleanup method to the page unload to delete all temporary files that were used to feed source into image controls when displaying pictures on a website.
I'm looking for an asp.NET control that will allow for viewing and printing of a pdf and TIFF within a web form. I'm willing to use more than 1 control if needed (1 control for pdf, 1 for Tiff, show and hide based on file extension), but I have not been able to find a good Tiff viewer.
Files are stored on our LAN in a shared folder, and this application is an intranet site.
Open source / free licensing preferred, but I'm willing to look at paid options as well.
http://www.alternatiff.com/ is one of the viewers that I've seen used for this type of viewing of tiffs.
You can get a free licence of ABCPDF (provided you link back to their site) which will do the conversion from TIFF to PDF for you as per #Chris Lively 's suggestion.
It'll also do conversion from PDF to TIFF if you decide to do things backwards.
It makes sense to present the content in a common format. If you wanted to you can embed the PDF in the browser to create the 'seamless' experience you're looking for using something like PDFObject.
As #BenCr says though, PDF is a really common format and the tools already exist to open and work with them, so introducing new ways to perform existing tasks could actually end up complicating matters unnecessarily.
I'm in total agreement with #BenCr on this.
Viewing PDFs is an extremely common thing to do. This isn't a "technical" issue by any stretch.
It sounds like you have some type of faxing solution in place that is creating these documents. Most likely multi-page TIFF and PDFs.
If this is the case you might want to just convert the TIFFs to PDFs to begin with and run everything through Adobe's pdf reader. Every online fax solution does this.
You could try http://issuu.com/ and they appear to have a API too if you want to go that deep.
We used the the Seadragon control to do this. I think it was an overkill and we should have just rolled our own -- would have been cheaper than integrating it. TIFFs and PDFs are converted to PNG on the server side. I don't think you can do better than that, especially with PDFs (assuming you don't want to use Acrobat Reader to display them). Convert PDFs to PNG using Xpdf/Poppler.
How about using Google Docs Viewer?
EDIT: Probably not working, since the viewer has to read the document from your URL; when it's on the Intranet, this won't work.
If you can mess about with mime types -- mainly by making the .tiff files expose an application/pdf mimetype -- you should be able to get acrobat to open TIFF files directly by effectively fooling the browser to open TIFF files with acrobat. Then all you need is a trusty old iframe to get you familiar UI with print buttons.
I want to know how I can view a PDF through a C# .net desktop App. I am trying to create a application to view PDF using visual studio 2008
There is a pdf reader libraries called iText(iTextSharp). But it didn't help me
You can host a ie web browser control in your application and that will allow the user to view a pdf if they have a reader installed.
I can provide an example if you tell me whether you are using WPF or WinForms.
Drag WebControl on to you form
Set the path in code
Done Press F5
I'm not sure what netbeans has to do with anything, but take a look at this question here How to render pdfs using C#
Essentially you need to get a 3rd party PDF viewer or write one yourself. There are quite a few around and would probably take a look at something like PDFViewForNet
iText isn't a PDF viewer.
If you want to read PDF documents in your application there are couple of Open Source PDF Libraries.
I have a web page in which user has to enter many details.
I want to fetch the records that are being entered by the user and generate a pdf file, and also preview it in a browser.
I also want to save the pdf into the database.
Can anyone help me to understand how this process should start?? I mean how should I proceed?
I am using Visual Studio 2008 and mysql. I have adobe reader installed on my system. What else do I need?
Can I get the tutorials or code samples which will help me.
thank you
Adobe Reader is just what it says, a Reader application, and will not help with generating a PDF. I recommend you to have a look at iTextSharp
You'll need a third party library for the pdf generation, such as Report.net or ITextSharp.
The problem I see with browser preview, is that I don't know of a good way of doing it. If you just want to show them the data that goes in to the PDF, then just displaying that on a web page is easy enough. The problem is previewing the actual PDF. That will require the user to have some sort of PDF reader installed, and it will also require that their browser opens the PDF automatically and doesn't try to save it instead. It also has the problem of how the user will "get back" to your website once they're done with the previewing.
Does anyone know if the following is possible and if so what the best way of doing it is for free?
I am generating a PrintDocument in a project I am currently working on and displaying a print dialog box so a user can choose which printer they want to use etc. The is currently a windows form application and if a user wants to print to a PDF they can select to print to CutePDF or something similar.
However I am now putting a ASP.Net web frontend on the application and want to use the same code to generate the PrintDocument but want to print it to a PDF on the fly and serve it up via the Response stream in the format of a PDF download.
So my question is....How can I use the current PrintDocument and generate a PDF in memory from it??
Thanks
The System.Drawing code for a PrintDocument can be reused to generate a PDF document with ABCpdf .NET. See the System.Drawing example...
You would have to use a 3rd party component in order to generate the PDF. The following article has some links to some such components: Generating PDF Files from .Net
You're in a world of hurt if you think you're going to run the "same code" that deals with printers in both a forms app and an ASP.NET app.
You might be in luck, however, as it appears that PDFsharp + MigraDoc might be able to do this for you.
I think you will find there is not any tools that will take a PrintDocument as input and render a PDF as output. The only way to do what you want is to "print" the PrintDocument to a "PDF printer driver" that will generate PDF. Basically a virtual printer that will generate PDF instead of printing the actual output. There are a plethora of products on the market for that. A couple that are cheap and widely used are as follows:
Ghostscript with RedMon (open source/GPL or commercial licenses available)
Foxit Software's PDF Creator ($29)
You really should be looking at iTextSharp (it is mentioned on the iText.NET page recommended earlier)
http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/
PrintDocument is meant for Windows Forms applications but is up and coming in SilverLight, see this video... http://silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/printing-api-basics/
If you wish to continue with the PrintDocument and a web application, I think SilverLight 4 (which is beta right now) is the only way to go, or your going to have to have a lite weight windows form application installed locally for the end user that maybe uses web services.
iTextSharp is a great tool for generating PDFs with .NET on the Internet. I highly recommend it; I've used iText with Java...and have been using iTextSharp for the past few years.
There are several ports of iText for .NET (A very popular open-source PDF library for Java).
http://www.ujihara.jp/iTextdotNET/en/