Previewing TIF documents on the Web (.Net C#)

Question

I am looking for a way to display TIF documents on a web page. It basically needs to render a Multi-page TIF in some form of container on a web page.

Do I need a control or is there a simple way to build something like this? Is there any free stuff that we could simply implement?

I have looked at the Telerik reporting product which apparently contains a Tif viewer. I haven't looked into the licensing for this though. (If I only need the TIF Viewer, do I need to purchase the entire reporting solution?

Our biggest issue at the moment (like always) is that we have a very tight deadline with very little available resource. This product will be installed at a client so ActiveX controls that request user permission to install are less than ideal.

Any suggestions and/or comments would be welcome.

Thanks

Answer 1

Use a library server-side to convert the TIF to a PDF (assuming that it's a common plug-in that most people have) which will eliminate the need to install another, convert each page of the TIF into a GIF or JPG and present those, again fully supported by browsers eliminating the need for an additional plug-in.

You could probably do this conversion on-the-fly and then cache the output to reduce subsequent loading times.

Answer 2

Snowbound Software has a pretty good image viewer. It does not use ActiveX. Displaying tiffs is not difficult, but sometimes you need something quick.

Answer 3

If you want to try and roll your own (this would be a lot of work), you can use the System.Drawing namespace to convert TIF images to a browser-supported format, like PNG or JPG, or a third party library like AbcPdf to go to PDF as Lazarus suggested. The problem here is that you would have to create and code-behind a toolset for magnification, cropping, and multi-page support, along with whatever else you would want, which could be quite a bit of coding (unless you went to PDF and relied on Adobe Reader). Also, the server-side conversion can be prohibitive for speed if you're dealing with large TIF files or with formats that aren't supported.

As far as vendor solutions are concerned, I don't know of any good free viewing plugins off-hand. R Ubben is right; Snowbound's viewer is nice, but if I recall, the AJAX version requires it's own website that you pass the image to, which then gets rendered to the client, which may bring up some security issues (and leaves a bad taste in my mouth anyway). Atalasoft has an excellent AJAX image viewer and a very powerful imaging SDK, but it does cost a bit. My current company has settled on an ActiveX plugin from Pegasus Imaging (recently merged with Accusoft) called Prizm Viewer. The viewer itself is quite powerful, can handle many image formats, and is scriptable. It does have drawbacks (beyond being an ActiveX control). We've had some trouble with our desktop deployments as the default install will only push for the current user as opposed to the local machine, but we've fixed that with a post-install registry hack.

I would say that, if you have the cash and want a robust imaging solution, go with Atalasoft. Otherwise, Pegasus is fairly cheap and works just fine, unless you have severe aversions to ActiveX. There are lots of other options out there, it's just a matter of how much money you have and how much coding you want to do.

Answer 4

There's a good, free viewer that has an ActiveX version for IE and a Mozilla plugin for Firefox. Alternatiff. It's free but requires registration that's fairly painless.

Answer 5

@ R Ubben

Thanks for mentioning our AJAX application! There is a live version of the ajax document viewing application, VirtualViewer, available at http://ajaxdocumentviewers.com and a free trial download. VirtualViewer may be overkill for simply viewing TIFF images on the web - depending on the size of your organization - so we also provide the RasterMaster SDK so you can build your own file conversion and viewing apps.

Doug