Tools to thumbnail multiple extension types

Question

My requirements are to be able to thumbnail the major image and file extensions: doc(x), txt, xls(x), pdf, rte, and as many others as possible.

We have been hooking into Office extensions to do this in the past, but they are not really supported on Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.

Are there any third party thumbnailing applications that you have had success implementing? Preferably ones that are easy to invoke from .Net

Answer 1

Check out this link I think this is what you need. Library for handling and retrieving system icons.

Answer 2

There is a part of Alfresco (open source) that does this. It generates thumbnails using PDFs. The PDFs are in turn generated form the original documents using Open Office, but if you can hook into MS Office to generate PDFs, a similar approach could work.

Answer 3

.Net can create thumbnails for most Image formats.

You can use GhostScript to convert a PDF or PostScript(PS) file to an image.

If you can use proprietary application API's/automation (eg Office automation) to print to a PDF or to a PS printer driver you can then convert to an image using GhostScript and hence to the required thumbnail.

In most cases getting to PDF/PS means a standard process from there on....

In Office you can even open an Html page and print to a PS (or even PDF these days) and thumbnail that....

Answer 4

Hi,

My suggestion would be that you write your own printer driver that generates thumbnails, and then use DDE to let the associated application print to your custom printer driver. There is some work to be done, but it will work with any file format that you can print from the windows explorer.

Your printer driver only needs to receive the text and bitmaps from the application that's doing the printing, and use GDI to draw them on a canvas.