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46

answers:

1

I am managing a bunch of PDF files in an android application maintaining a list of records in a SQLite database as well as storing the pdf files on the external storage.

Now I would like to present a thumbnail of the first page of the pdf in my list view as part of each cell representing a pdf.

I am aware of libraries like iText, fop.. on the JavaSE side that can render a PDF but I would rather not delve into embedding a large library like that. On a similar approach I would also rather not embed a native PDF viewer like droidreader, apv or vudroid.

Otherwise I could of course also get it rendered on a server via some webservice but that is a lot of headache as well.

I am already using intents to get the pdf's displayed for the user so I was thinking it would be great if I could get a thumbnail via a intent call as a result somehow. However I found nothing on the web (e.g. on openintents) that indicates something like that exists ..

So I am a bit at a loss on what to do? What do you think is the best approach to get these thumbnails into my app? Are there any public intents available? Or did I just totally miss something and the SDK provides features for that already (it should imho but currently does not)?

A: 

You are going to get a lot faster resopnse rasterizing the PDFs on the server and there are lots of libraries to do this in C, Java, Php.

mark stephens
Yes..but then I rely on a web connection and have to maintain a server side service for it. Also with transfer times back and forth it might not be faster at all.
Manfred Moser