A good PDF view component for .net

Question

Hello:

My application incorporates the manual as a PDF file and I want that the user can read the manual without exit and with a minimun overload.

Do you know any free (as in beer) component for .net that can just read pdf files? (I don't need editing).

Thank you.

P.D.: Yes, I did Googled, but I can't find a free one.

P.D.2.: If I don't need to install anything on the target computer, then it could be perfect!

Answer 1

Edit - Added

You don't specify what you're using as a development language. I'm guessing that it's some .Net language. If not, this will NOT be helpful to you.

End Added Content

Is this a Windows Forms application?

I don't know if you've thought of this, but you can create a form with a WebBrowser control, and set the WebBrowser's DocumentSource to be the PDF document you're talking about. This form can be controlled by your application. The WebBrowser control will just use whatever version of Adobe Acrobat that Internet Explorer would use on the client's PC. Almost every computer out there has some version of the Acropbat Viewer, so there is very little chance you would need to install anything.

The reasons I recommend this are:

1. No need to buy a component
2. It works. Simply, beautifully, and it's as error free as just opening the PDF via Internet Explorer.

Answer 2

I'm assuming this is a Windows application written for .NET framwork. In that context, language matters relatively little (except for one's own fluency in particular languages). In fact, since there are several open sources libraries in C, one may just put a small .NET wrapper around these and bind this to a "true" .NET app

Have you looked at iTextSharp or maybe MuPDF ?

Neither of these libraries should bloat your application too much (much of PDF libaries footprint it taken up by fonts and such...).

Edit: (just saw David's cool solution based on webForm!)

Integrating the PDF library may give you more flexibility (and headaches), but the webForm trick is certainly superior, given the broad availability of PDF-ready workstations in the Windows world.