How to render pdfs using C#

Question

I want to load and draw pdf files graphically using C#. I don't need to edit them or anything, just render them at a given zoom level.

The pdf libraries I have found seem to be focussed on generation. How do I do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Dynamic PDF Viewer from ceTe software might do what you're looking for. I've used their generator software and was pretty happy with it.

http://www.dynamicpdf.com/

Answer 2

iTextSharp is a good open source library.

http://csharp-source.net/open-source/pdf-libraries/itextsharp

Answer 3

Use the web browser control. This requires Adobe reader to be installed but most likely you have it anyway. Set the UrL of the control to the file location.

Answer 4

You could google for PDF viewer component, and come up with more than a few hits.

If you don't really need to embed them in your app, though - you can just require Acrobat Reader or FoxIt (or bundle it, if it meets their respective licensing terms) and shell out to it. It's not as cool, but it gets the job done for free.

Answer 5

The easiest lib I have used is Paolo Gios's library. It's basically

Create GiosPDFDocument object
Create TextArea object
Add text, images, etc to TextArea object
Add TextArea object to PDFDocument object
Write to stream

This is a great tutorial to get you started.

Answer 6

Here is my answer from a different question.

First you need to reference the Adobe Reader ActiveX Control

Adobe Acrobat Browser Control Type Library 1.0

%programfiles&\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\AcroPDF.dll

Then you just drag it into your Windows Form from the Toolbox.

And use some code like this to initialize the ActiveX Control.

private void InitializeAdobe(string filePath)
{
    try
    {
        this.axAcroPDF1.LoadFile(filePath);
        this.axAcroPDF1.src = filePath;
        this.axAcroPDF1.setShowToolbar(false);
        this.axAcroPDF1.setView("FitH");
        this.axAcroPDF1.setLayoutMode("SinglePage");
        this.axAcroPDF1.Show();
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        throw;
    }
}

Make sure when your Form closes that you dispose of the ActiveX Control

this.axAcroPDF1.Dispose();
this.axAcroPDF1 = null;

otherwise Acrobat might be left lying around.

Answer 7

There are a few other choices in case the Adobe ActiveX isn't what you're looking for (since Acrobat must be present on the user machine and you can't ship it yourself).

For creating the PDF preview, first have a look at some other discussions on the subject on StackOverflow:

• How can I take preview of documents?
• Get a preview jpeg of a pdf on windows?
• .NET open PDF in winform without external dependencies
• PDF Previewing and viewing

In the last two I talk about a few things you can try:

• You can get a commercial renderer (PDFViewForNet, PDFRasterizer.NET, ABCPDF, ActivePDF, ...).
  Most are fairly expensive though, especially if all you care about is making a simple preview/thumbnails.

• In addition to Omar Shahine's code snippet, there is a CodeProject article that shows how to use the Adobe ActiveX, but it may be out of date, easily broken by new releases and its legality is murky (basically it's ok for internal use but you can't ship it and you can't use it on a server to produce images of PDF).

• You could have a look at the source code for SumatraPDF, an OpenSource PDF viewer for windows.

• There is also Poppler, a rendering engine that uses Xpdf as a rendering engine. All of these are great but they will require a fair amount of commitment to make make them work and interface with .Net.

• You may want to consider using GhostScript as an interpreter because rendering pages is a fairly simple process.
  The drawback is that you will need to either re-package it to install it with your app, or make it a pre-requisite (or at least a part of your install process).
  It's not a big challenge, and it's certainly easier than having to massage the other rendering engines into cooperating with .Net.
  I did a small project that you will find on the Developer Express forums as an attachment.
  Be careful of the license requirements for GhostScript through.
  If you can't leave with that then commercial software is probably your only choice.

Answer 8

ABCpdf will do this and many other things for you.

Not ony will it render your PDF to a variety of formats (eg JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG 2000; vector EPS, SVG, Flash and PostScript) but it can also do so in a variety of color spaces (eg Gray, RGB, CMYK) and bit depths (eg 1, 8, 16 bits per component).

And that's just some of what it will do!

For more details see:

http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-8.htm

Oh and you can get free licenses via the free license scheme.

There are EULA issues with using Acrobat to do PDF rendering. If you want to go down this route check the legalities very carefully first.

Answer 9

Disclaimer: I work for Atalasoft

We have a PDF Rasterizer that can do this for .NET

http://www.atalasoft.com/products/dotimage/pdfrasterizer/