hosting a PDF in a c# application

Question

Hey guys, I am creating an ebook for a friend. He has the content in word (docx) so I have a few questions. I created a thread earlier on how to approach this and the best response was to create PDF's out of it. The main point of this was so we can have insertable textboxes, links, and table of contents.

Now I was wondering if I can host the pdfs in my application. I want to make an "adobe reader" basically. Is there a library out there that does this? Can I use installed COM/dlls to do this?

The reason for this is that I was to create like a "quiz" section on my application, or a "report card" or even a "bookmark" feature.

Thanks guys.

Answer 1

I know this has been asked before, but I can't remember where. The accepted answer was something along these lines:

It would be a very bad idea to create your own PDF reader, because:

1. you are not in control of when Adobe changes specs
2. Adobe provides a reader free of charge, and most users already have it installed.
3. Given the previous two statements, why would you want to spend that much time on reinventing the wheel? It makes sense to reinvent the wheel when you can improve upon it, but not when you are just copying functionality that is freely available.

It would be far better to find a way to use the Acrobat reader that they have already designed, and distribute free of charge.

This is very easy to do. All you need to do us use the WebBrowser control (assuming this is WinForms) and set the DocumentSource to the PDF file. The WebBrowser control will just automatically use whatever pdf reader is already installed on the client PC, just as would Internet Explorer.

Answer 2

Making a custom PDF browser control could be an extremely challenging task. You could instead use the real Adobe Reader in your application as it is provided as a COM control which could be hosted in any Windows application. Here are the steps:

1. Start a new WinForms application
2. Make the Acrobat control available in the toolbox (Tools -> Add/Remove Toolbox Items: turn on "Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Browser Document" in COM Components tab). Don't forget to grab a cup of coffee before clicking on the COM tab.
3. Drag the control to the form

4. Manipulate it:

   axAcroPDF1.LoadFile("mypdf.pdf");
   axAcroPDF1.Show();
   

Answer 3

I've had very good experiences working the the Aspose libraries. They're affordable and will save you a lot of time.

Answer 4

You can embed Adobe Reader in your apps via the ActiveX component that is installed on your machine along with the reader. You can add it to your VS Toolbox from the COM Components tab. Anyone who has Abobe Reader installed will then be able to use your app to view PDF documents. Note that if there is not Adobe Reader installed your program will not work, or you need somehow to provide the lib with the application. If you want something that does not require Adobe Reader then you may like to check out the iText#.

Answer 5

A potential problem with using a Adobe ActiveX/com component is that the user must have Adobe Reader installed for this to work (I don't think you're able and/or allowed to redistribute the activeX control only and wouldn't want to force my users to install Adobe Reader). So for more serious work I would try to use a Pdf library that you can distribute with your code such as writing a (presumably very small) P/Invoke wrapper for the open source library http://ccxvii.net/mupdf/ or if you can/want afford it use some commercial library.

An problem with using a webbrowser control is that you have to be careful to test what happens if a target user as embedding of pdf disabled in IE. It can happen that instead of embedding you get a external adobe reader (or whatever is registered as pdf handler) pop up! There might be a workaround, but I've been bitten by this before (resulting in one of those "works on my machine" problems)