Develop Reference

Does MuPdf library have unicode or text search functionality?

Background
I am working on a WPF windows application and I want add embedded PDF viewer with only basic functionalities including PDF view, text search and page navigation.
I tried embedded Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF Reader installed method (this way ) but this method is not suitable for our requirement as Adobe PDF Reader has too may external links which can not be allowed because of the security reasons of the application.
Therefore, I am trying to use moonpdf library. This library works fine with our requirements but the only problem is there is no text search functionality in this library. (I think it shows PDF as images)
Then, I have download moonpdf source code and realized that moonpdf is using libmupdf.dll wrapping to c#.
I can modify the moonpdf source code and mupdf source code for our requirement if needed.
My Question
Is there any text search functionalities in mupdf? if so how can I use it?

In the basic mupdf library, there are several functions for searching for text. These work by searching a page for a text string, in a few different variants, and returns the area for all hits of the given text. You need to iterate over the pages yourself (in order to do forward or reverse search).
fz_quad hits[1000];
count = fz_search_page(ctx, page, needle, hits, nelem(hits));
That said, I do not know how or even if "moonpdf" has wrapped these functions.

You can certainly extract the text from a document, the MuPDF library will do that. I believe it's up to you to apply your own search criteria after that. I'm afraid I'm not expert enough to answer the 'how to' part of it though. I imagine one of the mutool examples would be helpful here though. I'll see if I can get one of the developers to answer.

Server Side HTML to PDF

I'm trying to find a C# library that will allow me to "Print" one of my HTML pages to a PDF file. I can't seem to find out if one currently exists that will allow you to do this. I've found several that will let you build a page, but haven't noticed if one would generate the pdf only based off of HTML.
EDIT: I'm not allowed a budget on this at work so it will need to be an open source/free product. If not I'm aware of iTextSharp and will have to generate the pdf programmatically (which is what I'm hoping to avoid :) )

I've had a lot of luck with ActivePDF WebGrabber. It's kind of odd to use compared to standard managed libraries (ActivePDF is unmanaged), but it gets the job done.

iTextSharp comes with a little companion : XML Worker
For a demo, have a look here
Even though the documentation refers to the Java API, the adaptation to C# should be straightforward.

I've experimented with itextsharp and it works for basic conversion, but gets complicated when you get into styles and formatting. I've also heard wkhtmltopdf is out there as another option.

How do I explore a PDF to determine if an element is text?

I have a PDF and want to extract the text contained in it. I've tried a few different PDF libraries and they all return basically the same results. When extracting the text from a two page document with literally hundreds of words, only a dozen or so words from the header are returned.
Is there any way to tell if the text I'm after is actually text or a raster image of the text? I'm thinking something along the lines of Firebug's "Inspect Element" but at this point I'll take any solution that tells what I'm really looking at.
This project really doesn't justify attempting to use OCR. And, although a simple solution, using fields in the PDF is not an option since the generator of the file is a third party.

If Acrobat/Reader can select the text, then it Is Text.
Reasons your library might not be able to find the text in question:
Complex/bad fonts or encodings. Adobe can be very forgiving of garbage in, somehow managing to get Good Info out.
The text could be in an annotation rather than the page contents. It won't matter what program parses the content stream if you need to look in the annot array instead.
You didn't name a particular library, so it's possible that the library you're using doesn't look inside XObject Forms. That's unlikely in an even remotely mature API, but stranger things have happened.
If you can get away with copy/pasta from Reader, then just go that route.

Have you tried Amyuni PDF Creator .Net? It allows you to enumerate all components from a specified rectangular region of a page and inspect their type from a predefined types list. You could run a quick test using the trial version and the following code sample for text extraction:
// open a PDF file
axPDFCreactiveX1.Open(System.IO.Directory.GetCurrentDirectory()+"\\sampleBookmarks.pdf", "");
axPDFCreactiveX1.Refresh ();
String text = axPDFCreactiveX1.GetRawPageText (1);
MessageBox.Show (text);
Additionally, it provides Tesseract OCR integration in case you needed it.
Disclaimer: I am part of the development team of this product.

Check this site out. It may contain some helpful code snippets. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/PDFToText.aspx

Batch conversion of docx to clean HTML

I'm starting to wonder if this is even possible. I've searched for solutions on Google and come up with nothing that works exactly how I'd like it to.
I think it'd benefit to explain what that entails. I work for database group at my university's IT department. My main job is to take specs of a report in a docx file, copy that over to dreamweaver, fix some formatting, and put it onto their website. My issue is that it's ridiculously tedious to do this over and over. I figured, hey, I haven't written anything in C# for some time now, perhaps I could write an application to grab a docx file, convert it to HTML, fix the CSS, stick the header, and footer from the webpage on there, and save the result. I originally planned to have it do one by one, but it probably wouldn't be difficult to have it input a list of files and batch convert.
I've found these relevant topics on how to accomplish this, but they don't fit my needs well enough.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/howdoi/how-do-i-modify-word-documents-using-c/190
This is probably fine for a few documents, but since it's just automating an instance of Word, I feel like it'd be slow and memory intensive. I'd prefer to avoid opening and closing an instance of Word 50+ times.
http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/333.aspx
This is what I started using. XSLT had the benefit of not needing word to be installed nor ran for each file. After some searching I got a proof of concept working. It takes in a docx file, decompresses it, grabs the document.xml from that, and uses the DocX2Html.xsl file I scavenged from OpenXML viewer. I believe that was originally provided by MS for sharepoint servers to provide the ability to render word documents in a browser. Or something along those lines.
After adjusting that code to fit my needs, and having issues with the objXSLT.Load () method, I ended up using IlMerge to make the XSL into a DLL. No idea why I kept getting a compile error when using the plain old XSL file, but the DLL worked fine, so I was satisfied. Here (http://pastebin.com/a5HBAakJ) is my current code. It does the job of converting docx to HTML just fine (other than random spaces between some words), but the result file has ridiculously ugly HTML syntax. An example of this monstrosity can be found here (http://pastebin.com/b8sPGmFE).
Does anyone know how I could remedy this? I'm thinking perhaps I need to make a new XSL file, as the one MS provided is what's responsible for sticking all those tags and extra code in there. My issue with that is that I don't know anything about how to do that. Perhaps there's an alternative version already out there. All I'd need is one that will preserve tables and text formatting. Images aren't needed.

This looks like just what you need: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628051(v=office.14).aspx
The author Eric White blogged about his experiences developing that tool. You can see that list of posts on his blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericwhite/archive/2008/10/20/eric-white-s-blog-s-table-of-contents.aspx#Open_XML_to_XHtml

Since I'm a big fan of Aspose.Words, a commercial library to create/process Word documents, I would do something like:
Open the Word document with Aspose.Words.
Save the Word document as HTML.
Use something like SgmlReader or HTML Agility Pack (or even Regular Expressions if it is suitable) to remove unwanted HTML tags/attributes.
Since you wrote you work at an university, I'm not sure whether commercial packages are an option, though.

Hi not sure what the rules are on promoting your own solutions, so do let me know if I am out of line.
I am a web developer who had the same issues, so I created my own tool:
http://www.convertwordtohtml.com
We are also working on a new version that will have even better conversion quality and one click conversion eg you can right click on a word file and it will be directly converted to html and the code placed into the clipboard. The current version also supports command line access and the new version will have a server version to.
There is a free trial version downloadable from the site , and if you have any questions do contact me any time.

ASP.Net Converting and Merging documents into single PDF

I need to have the ability to convert and merge various documents into a single Pdf.
The documents could be of varying types, such as Word, Open Office, Images, Text, Web pages (by URL) and the PDF would usually consist of 2-3 documents.
At the moment, we are using BCL Technologies easyPDF with Microsoft Office installed onto the Server. This handles most documents but we haven't had it doing Open Office ones yet.
We currently produce around 100-1000 of these PDF's per day.
The reason I am asking the question is that performance is a key issue. The PDF is generated for users on the fly and so the waiting times we are currently getting of 30-60 seconds is becoming unacceptable.
We have done some caching around documents when they are intially uploaded so the main tasks that happens when a User requests a Pdf is merging a number of already generated Pdf's.
Does anyone else have any other tools they have used that work reliably for most common document types and above all, quickly? When put like that, it seems like I'm asking a lot!
Edit:
Thanks for all the great advice, I'll look into some of these and compare performance.
Just to add to all this, money is not really an object. We're more than happy to pay for different applications to perform each task as well as looking into various hardware options to distribute the load as much as possible.

Merging multiple PDF documents is normally simple enough (as long as they don't need to be merged on the same page) - you could compare your merge performance with something like iTextSharp (.NET version of iText) to be sure it isn't a bottleneck - otherwise the conversion from other formats to PDF is likely the bottleneck.
In almost all cases, the method used to convert X to PDF is to execute the applications print command, targeted at a software PDF printer, to create a temporary PDF file.
This means:
The target application (for example Office) is opened and closed
The document has to travel through the printing service
In your situation, are you converting arbitrary documents submitted by the users, or do the documents come from a stored library of files? If it's a library, you could make a PDF copy of each file as it is added to the library (instead of when the user makes a request), and then only merge the PDF files.

We use ABC Pdf. I don't know if it will be fast enough for your needs, but it seems to work for our use.

I had a very similar issue where we had documents that were already existing in PDF format and needed to allow the user to see them all combined together. We purchased the PDF4NET product which was about $500 from what I recall. It was extremely easy to use and they provide awesome examples of how to use the tools.
O2 Solutions - PDF4NET
Here is the code sample that they provide for merging. The top line looks like it just outputs the file, the second 2 lines allow for streaming the content back to the user.
PDFFile.MergeFilesToDisk( "append.pdf", "unicode.pdf", "multicolumntextandimages.pdf" );
PDFDocument doc = PDFFile.MergeFilesToDoc( "append.pdf", "unicode.pdf", "multicolumntextandimages.pdf" );
doc.SaveToStream( stream );

You say you're using Microsoft Office to open these files, I would imagine this is the bottleneck rather than the actual PDF creation.
Is it possible to distill these documents into a more accessible format (html/xml/database), so that it's not necessary to open office every time a PDF needs to be created?

While I have no PDF conversion suggestions I can say that this problem sounds like one which could be distributed over a number of nodes. Do you find that the PDF generation is CPU-bound or are there other limiting factors? Before expending too much effort on rewriting the PDF library interface you might want to see what the bottlenecks are.