A technology for reading pdfs online with annotations?

Question

Hi, is there an open source solution that displays PDFs for online reading? It has to be searchable much like google books and if possible has the ability to display annotations?

Answer 1

By "online reading" I'll assume you mean without a PDF reader plugin on the client. In that case you'll need to convert to HTML

http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/

If you don't mind losing the ability to copy text then converting to PNG may give you a more accurate rendering

http://www.imagemagick.org/

Regardless of the output format you can manage your searching using the original PDF data. One technology for this is mnogosearch

http://www.mnogosearch.org/

Monogosearch uses pdftotext internally, you may find this useful if you want to write your own search routines. pdftotext is part of the Xpdf suite of utilities

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/about.html

All of the tools listed above are available on Windows or Linux

Answer 2

Don't know if you are looking a software to install or some service to pay for... I've read a lot about www.getbackboard.com (this is not advertising, only reporting something I've read about, that maybe fits your needs.. ;)

Answer 3

Not sure if they do annotations, but both of these will show PDFs quite well:

http://pdfmenot.com

http://docs.google.com

Answer 4

ICEPdf recently released their code as open source. It is Java based.

Answer 5

PyPdf is really nice. It supports reading the text as well as encryption which I know that itextsharp does not.

Of course you'd have to program in python as IronPython's class libraries aren't quite to the point where you can ref them from another language and use them. (But I imagine they will be someday soon) PyPdf

Answer 6

This is not open source, but check it out anyways. You can download a free trial of their SDK to try it out. Reading PDF's and their annotations is not simple and I wouldn't trust a production app to open source decoders.

Here is an online demo. http://www.atalasoft.com/ajaxannotations/default.aspx

Another good pdf reader is FoxitReader.

Answer 7

You may also be interested in the Vuzit DocuPub Platform: http://vuzit.com/products/docupub_platform

The display technology itself is not open source, but they provide an API to access their service, so perhaps it is worth investigating.