What my users will do is select a PDF document on their machine, upload it to my website, where I will convert into an HTML document for display on the website. The document will be stored in a database after conversion.
What's the best way to convert a PDF to HTML?
I have been handed a requirement where a user would create a "news" story as a pdf and then would upload it to the sever, where it will be converted to HTML and displayed on the website.
I don't think converting a PDF to an HTML string is necessarily the best idea, especially if you want to export it back as PDF. PDF files often contain binary elements such as images, so you may be best to convert it to ASCII via an encoding, such as Base64. That way you will have an ASCII string you can save into a text field in the DB and then convert it back out. Could you expand more on the main requirement?
My recommendation would be to not do it that way IF POSSIBLE (but we all know what managers are like) so...
I would recommend that you stay away from converting the PDF to/from HTML (because unless you can find a commercial solution it will be nigh on impossible) and instead do as has already been mentioned and store it as an encoded Base64 string, or BLOB or some other binary format in the database, and then display it to the user with some sort of PDF view plugin for the browser.
All it took was a simple google search for "PDF to HTML": http://www.gnostice.com/pdf2manyOverview_x.asp. I'm sure there are others.
So while it's 'possible', you may want to explain to your manager that this isn't the best content management solution.
Why not use the iTextSharp to read the PDF content? Then You could save both the binary PDF and the text content to the database. You could then let users search the content and download the PDF.
Any document creation software that can save documents as PDF can save them as HTML. I'm assuming the issue is that your users will be creating rich documents (lots of embedded images), which results in multiple files, and your requirements stem from a desire to make uploading these documents as simple as possible to the user.
There are numerous conversion packages that can probably do this for you, however when you're talking about rich content, you are talking about text plus images. Those images have to be stored somewhere and served somehow, and whatever conversion method you use will require you to examine all image sources to make sure they point to valid locations on your server.
I would like to suggest an alternate way of doing this that you can take to your team: Implement one of the many blog APIs for publishing content. There are free and commercial software packages that use these APIs to publish content directly to a website, such as Windows Live Writer and Microsoft Word. Your users can simply create their content and upload it directly to your website without having to publish it as PDF first then upload it. So the process becomes much smoother for your users, and you get the posts in a form that doesn't require you spend thousands of dollars on developing or buying conversion code.
The two most common APIs are the MetaWeblog API and the Movable Type API. Both are very simple and easy to implement. I think this way would be a MUCH better alternative than what you're thinking about doing.
You should look into DynamicPDF. They have a converter (currently Beta) out for serving exactly this purpose. We have used their products with great success (especially for dumping Reporting Services reports directly to PDF).