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How to render a PDF without either text or images

Does anyone know a way to render or export a pdf with either the text or the images stripped out?
I noticed a way that uses GhostScript:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/38010769/4437032
Unfortunately it would require me to get a commercial licence (since I intend to distribute).
The renderer I have been using up until now has been Pdfium, but that library has no capability to do this (without modifying the native code).
I also looked into PDFSharp, but it seems to be more for appending things to PDFs rather than removing things.
I cannot expect any kind of pdf editing software to be installed on machines that run my program, so ideally I'm looking for some free library.
Does anyone know of any solutions?

I ended up using the free version of Spire.Pdf to accomplish my goal, using it to create pdfs with either text or images. The free version limits you to a max of 10 pages in processed pdfs, but that is acceptable for me.
No images: delete all the images using Spire.Pdf
No text: extract all the images using Spire.Pdf, draw them onto a blank pdf.
then display the modified pdfs.

.NET graphic libraries to display images (pdf, .docx and any other format of image) in the browser

I am developing a ASP .NET MVC application where users are able to upload files to a repository. Those files could be pdf, doc, any type of image and so on.
When the user select a file to be imported I would like to display this file in the browser so they can review its contents before the upload.
I know I could use some sort of IFrame to display pdf but I am looking for some specific class or .net libraries to implement this feature.
I just need a north.

This is an extremely difficult problem. There are some libraries that can help. For instance PDF files might be rendered to images with ghostscript. Word and Excel files might be converted to PDF or image with a number of libraries. None of them, AFAIK, are very good at it so I can not recommend one.
You could automate MSO to perform the conversion to PDF, but that is decidedly not safe for server code. Another possibility is convert source documents to SWF files (like flexpaper) and display in flash. There are some great libraries out there, but it will limit your supported clients. Sharepoint has support for providing some of this capability as well. Others have used OpenOffice to convert MSO documents but also at a loss of quality.
I can't really advise any specific direction as it is highly dependent on what you/your company is willing to spend and the desired results. Good luck.

You could try to rely on Windows and the explorer thumbnails for it, like here, but then you'd have to make sure that:
You can abuse the server in the most elaborate way (install stuff, talk to the shell from ASP.NET)
You have a thumbnail provider installed on the server for every type that you want to preview. I guess from the moment you can see the thumbnail in explorer, you're set. So for pdf, you might need to install PDF Reader from Adobe.
Docx files should be saved with thumbnail checked (see link). There seems to be no other easy, free way to convert a docx to a thumbnail. The "best" solution I came across, was saving it automatically again somehow, and making sure the thumbnail option is checked.

I don't want to say that's impossible, but it can't be done with finite effort.
What you are asking for is a browser-based solution, because you want the user to be able to "review" the document before uploading.
Therefore you cannot use a server side solution, which is essentially what is being asked by referring to a ".Net library".
.Net libraries are dependent on an installed version of .Net, which does not exist in all versions for all operating systems for which graphical browsers exist.
Next, recent changes in browser security do not allow to read the full client-side file name of the selected file in the input field.
You'd have to rely on HTML5 and its FileReader to access the file's byte stream, but even then you can only retrieve image from image files. (see sample)
Excluding browser-based solutions in Flash, ActiveX, Java, due to browser and platform support, this leaves JavaScript as the only "reasonable" solution: you'd need a library for each supported format to either convert a file into an image in an image format supported by browsers, or extract the text(+image) representation of a file.

Great awnsers... Just want to share the result of my research and I found a nice client-based solution supported by Mozilla Labs. This is a framework based on HTML5 and Javascript with no native code needed.
Here the project website:
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
This is what you are capable of:
http://mozilla.github.com/pdf.js/web/viewer.html
And for the last a great video explaning how everthing works
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv15UY-4Fg8&noredirect=1
Reguarding my question we are going to converter every possible file to PDF on the server and then render this PDF using this framework.

Creating PDFs Online

We are using Report Definition laguage (RDL) templates to define various reports in one of our Sharepoint applications. These reports are (then) saved as PDFs into various SharePoint Document Library's. One report in-particular renders, but is considered to be "failing" due to the styling needs of the report. So it appears RDL only understand "very simple" HTML.
For Example:
Trademark characters are not rendering as superscript (they render as normal text instead)
The ability to assign Line Height fails
The ability to assign Word Spacing fails (so printers "leading" requirements fail)
Both of these point to various marked Microsoft limitation for RDL's to interprint various HTML...of which we are now aware.
So...
I need a better tool...and we are scratching our heads on this one!
QUESTION:
What tools take-in HTML, understand CSS (well!) and can generate PDFs from C-Sharp objects?
Please keep in-mind I need the to PDF generator tools you recommend (below) to understand CSS and HTML.
NOTE:
I looked at the various other StackEchange sites to see if there is a better forum for this particular question, but this one was the only one that seemed to fit-the-bill. If you are a mediator, and feel this question is mis-placed, please feel free to move this question.

This HTML to PDF converter has the most accurate conversion of a complex html/css page. There is also a demo to try the conversion with your html

Maybe you can give Amyuni WebkitPDF a try. It is a Free component for converting HTML+CSS into PDF files. From the home page:
Directly convert HTML files into PDF without the use of a web browser or a printer driver
Convert HTML files into XAML/XPS for rendering within Silverlight
Integrate and deploy the HTML conversion feature within your applications
Generate either a single continuous PDF page or split the HTML into multiple PDF pages
Amyuni WebkitPDF is distributed as a library with a sample application, and sample code for C++ and C#.
Disclaimer: I currently work as software developer at Amyuni Technologies.

I only know a workaround for the "leading space" issue. This example "leads" the value with 10 spaces:
=space(10) & Fields!FieldName.Value
This should work for any renderer, I'll update this if I come around other tricks.

Have a look at Aspose.Pdf for .NET: http://www.aspose.com/categories/.net-components/aspose.pdf-for-.net/default.aspx

how do I generate preview image based on first page of a PDF or PPT/PPTX or DOC/DOCX in ASP.NET C#

I have read all references and haven't found a solution on it.
Is there any 3rd-party component in .NET available for doing such a job? such as converting documents (doc, pdf, ppt, xls....) into images?
thank you very much and I'm waiting online...

You may want to take a look at ImageGlue.
As for the MS Office formats, I think the files need to have the thumbnail option enabled for ImageGlue to get the preview image.
My company implements a Digital Asset Management system that uses ImageGlue to generate preview images for a lot of different file formats, so it should definitely do the trick.

HTML Printing

I am too cheap to buy crystal reports so i built the report in asp.net, the only problem I'm facing is printing the report and making it look professional. On different printer's the report looks diff, i want to be able to control the final output and make the report print standard across all printers. You guys have any suggestions on how to achieve this properly?

Why not just use Reporting Services? It's free and easy to integrate with both WebForms and WinForms apps. Supports export to PDF, Excel, etc.

Mabye a stylesheet? Google it, good luck

You could try implementing a print stylesheet (you'll find many examples Googling the term), but that can be laborious if you're not familiar with css.
If you're checking out pdf solutions, I've used iTextSharp to create pdfs. It's relatively easy, open source and mature and used by many corporations.

You could try printing to a PDF. Not sure what your budget is, but ExpertPDF is a good option I'm using now.

You could create the report as a PDF using a C# library such as PDFsharp (Open-Source).
This approach allows you to:
Serve PDF files to your user, giving them the option to:
print it now
archive it for later use
Automatically email reports to your users using a scheduled task
Store generated PDFs in a database or on the file system

cutePDF is a free PDF writer and should work for what you need