Looking for a "Universal" Document viewer implemented as a Java Applet or with a Java SDK.

Question

I am looking for an Applet with similar functionality to the Oracle/Stellent OutsideIn ActiveX control or the Autonomy KeyView technology that act as a browser plug-in allowing the rendering/display of a large number of file formats (Word processing, spreadhseet, graphics, etc.) I currently use the Stellent solution, but due to some restrictions of some of our clients would prefer something that either exists as a Java Applet or has a Java API that I could build an applet on top of (neither of the two I mentioned do).

At a bare minimum it would need to display at least the following formats:

MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint

MS Outlook MSG files

Adobe PDF

Standard image formats: BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF

WordPerfect

HTML

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

It's not a plugin, but multivalent is a java library and browser for a large number of document formats, but probably not all the ones you'd like to cover.

It does at least cover the PDF, HTML, and any reasonable image format, but not any of the proprietary formats.

Answer 2

If you are looking for pure Java component that supports all these formats, I'm pretty confident that it doesn't exist. If what you want is to embed Browser, MS Office, Acrobat etc. you would need an ActiveX container.

Here are some choices:

JDIC - if you are using Swing (see the Document Viewer demo.)

SWT ActiveX container - if you are using SWT

TeamDev WinPack - if your time is more valuable than your money ;-) The product is very polished, the price is reasonable and the support is excellent.

Note that with any of these you need to have installed Acrobat, MS Office (or the free doc viewers) and whatever else applications you need to edit the file formats.

Answer 3

If a commercial product is an option, ViewOne is a nice product. It's an Applet and you can view a large variety of document.

Answer 4

Have you looked at Adeptol High Fidelity Document Viewer. No active x like KeyView or others, No applet like ViewOne Daeja. High Fidelity,fast and support for 300+ file formats including office documents, word, powerpoints, excel, tiff, pdf, images, autocad etc.