Component to view and annotate PDF documents

Question

Can anyone recommend a good Windows form component for displaying PDF documents and allowing users to add real annotation (by which I mean identical to that created by Adobe Reader).

Update: I've tried the AxAcroPDF component which Abobe installs alongside Reader, but this doesn't support annotation. I basically want AxAcroPDF combined with Reader's "Comment & Markup Toolbar". It seems that the Foxit SDK ActiveX supports this, so I'm going to try that. I just thought that there would be some more alternatives to choose from.

Answer 1

For editing the documents I have worked with SyncFusions Essential PDF and it worked quite well

Answer 2

The free version Foxit Reader does this, you can do Tools->Commenting Tools->Note, then click anywhere on the page of the PDF to place a little note icon which has text inside. Then just save the PDF. Later, if someone views the PDF in Acrobat or Foxit, just hover the mouse over or click on the little note icons on the page to view the comments.

Answer 3

If anyone's interested, it looks like we'll end up using jPDFNotes, from Qoppa Software.

To quote from the web site:

jPDFNotes is a Java™ bean that integrates into your application to display PDF documents and forms and allow your users to annotate the documents and fill the forms. After editing documents, the library can save them to a local file or the host application can override the save function to save the file to any location locally or on a network.

jPDFNotes is built on top of Qoppa's proprietary PDF technology so your users do not have to install Acrobat Reader or any other third party software or drivers. jPDFNotes is 100% Java so it is completely platform independent and so can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OSX and any other platform that supports the Java runtime environment.

It's not what we started looking for, but it seems to be exactly what we need. They seem a nice bunch of people too.

Answer 4

There's also http://a.nnotate.com which you can use as a PDF / Word annotation component in web applications - just uses AJAX / JS / HTML and displays the pdfs properly in the browser without needing adobe reader. (see http://a.nnotate.com/embed-guide.html for a working demo)