I use a file uploader and a user can upload .pdf, .jpg, .doc etc.
I have a grid like below at the web page:
At that grid I show the list of documents. And I want to show them like below:
Any idea? How can I do it? Are there any example?
I want to show a small size sight of documents in order to faciliate understanding at the first look.
If there were only image, I could use thumbnail for it but there are docs and pdf also..
(And the each sights should be an image of each document)
If you are running your server on windows you can use the shell's thumbnails. See this. That way you will get thumbnails for the images and a different icon dependng on the file type. Maybe you can even get it to work with PDF and DOC files, but that's a matter of fidding with the shell. On my machine (64-bit) I don't get thumbnails but there are fixes available.
Update: I followed the instructions at the end of this article and got thumbnails woking on my shell.
In order for this to work you will need to install MS office and adobe reader on the server, or at least create fake file associations.
Related
I have an ASP.NET WebForms application (written in C#) that allows users to upload files using the FileUpload control.
What'd be great is if I could automatically generate thumbnails from files. Images such as JPG/PNG are trivial of course, but users will often upload .DOC and .PDF files - is there a way I can essentially convert .DOC and .PDF files to images so I can get a thumbnail?
Thanks!
You can use GhostScriptWrapper for generating image thumbnails directly from pdf.You can get ghostScriptWrapper from GitHub or you can include ghostscript.dll from nuget package manager solution.
On paper the most hopeful approach would be to do so server side. So, if the file were uploaded, the server could generate a preview image.
On Windows, there would be a few options.
a) Windows Shell has a way to do it. The path is dangerous though.
b) https://filepreviews.io/ Is a service that does it, but they charge.
c) box is another service that does it.
Now on Linux, or even, perhaps, a Linux in a Windows subsystem, could do it with some command line utilities.
a) Convert the doc to pdf:
Convert DOC to PDF
b) Then, get a bitmap of the first page of the pdf, use ghostscript. ghostscript also exists for .NET and Windows.
Bitmap of PDF First Page
For PDf you can try ABCPDF from websupergoo. With that you should be able to generate a thumbnail,
Documentation link for creating a PNG from a PDF. http://www.websupergoo.com/helppdf8net/source/4-examples/19-rendering.htm
also for Doc, it is a little more complex, you are going to have to install the office application on the server that host the apps and from there manipulate the image.
Look at this article. It lets you extract the thumbnail image that Windows Explorer uses for Office documents and regular images.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa289172.aspx
How to embed a word document into another word document via OpenXML SDK, but showing content, not an icon of word? Such, as we do it manually in word: Insert object from file -> WITHOUT checking "Dispaly as icon"?
I've found this article, but it uses an icon. I've also tried to use OpenXML SDK Productivity Tool, but shows only generated binary data.
EDITED:
I use the following code:
DrawAspect = OleDrawAspectValues.Content
and then i add image part:
var imagePart = mainDocumentPart.AddNewPart<ImagePart>("image/x-emf", imagePartId);
GenerateImagePart(imagePart);
But my image part - is just an array of bytes of word's icon.
So, in this case happens the following: when i open generated document, it shows embedded document as an icon, but when i double click this embedded document, edit it and save changes, the embedded document is shown as a content, so maybe it's possible in some way to show this content without editing embedded document? Should i use instead of array of bytes of word's icon an array of bytes of doc's screenshot?
Not sure i described it clear, so please ask
I'm afraid what you are asking for is almost impossible.
The only difference as far as the word file is concerned between the icon and the embedded file, is the image.
When you don't use a icon Word pretty much just take a screenshot of the document you are embedding and inserts that in place of the Icon graphic.
I've uploaded an example I grabbed from a Word file I made. Found this little gem in the /media folder inside the .docx file.
So basicly, your only choice in resolving this if you can't live with the Icon is to somehow grab a picture of the word-file you want to embed and insert that instead of the Icon image.
How you'd go about that can't be pretty. First of all the open xml sdk contains no such functionality. I tried playing a bit around with office interop as well, but no luck.
I only see two possible ways to achieve this.
First one is via Interop. You'll need to install a "pretend printer" like the ones that print to PDF instead of sending it to a printer. This one however needs to print to an image format. The format of the file in the Media folder was .emf but I'm not positive thats a requirement.
Anyways, should the above somehow be possible you could embed that picture, pretty much using the example you link from Microsoft, and just change this size of the "icon" which now would be an image of the document.
Second possibility would be to open the word document as a process, set the document size to 72% (or whatever makes the document be the only one on screen on your desktop) and the grab a print screen and cut it down to just the document and the use that as your image for the embedding.
For the record, I don't recommend you do any of the above, but thoose are the only options I see.
Should someone have a better solution to this I'm all ears.
Finally, should you decide that you want to push on with this, I'll be happy to code up an example of option number 2 if you reply and tell me you'd like that.
Kaspar
There is a nice wrapper API (Document Builder 2.2) around open xml specially designed to merge documents, with flexibility of choosing the paragraphs to merge etc. You can download it from here.
Using this tool you can embed a paragraph of another word document or entire word document as per your requirement.
The documentation and screen casts on how to use it are here.
Hope this helps.
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.
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.
On the server that my application is being run on, a virtual PDF printer is being installed (don't know much about this yet, except it's from Adobe), and my application needs to use this 'printer' to create PDF's from HTML pages (a GridView mostly), and then redirect the user to the URL of the where the PDF is stored.
I've been looking at the PrintDocument object in System.Drawing.Printing, however I've read that you can't simply feed this a HTML page. What are my choices? The easiest option would be to be able to 'print' a given HTML page (choosing what and what not to print using CSS), but from what I've read this is fairly difficult, so I'm thinking about somehow constructing whatever object PrintDocument needs programatically, if that makes sense.
Any ideas on how I should do this?
there are some free/cheap libs for creating pdfs on the fly. I've used itextsharp before and it worked pretty well. Takes a bit of time to get up to speed in how it works but I'd suggest checking it out.
There are also printing services like Neevia DocConverter that will monitor a folder and auto convert whatever you put in the folder to a pdf, jpg, etc. you can set it up so that if you drop a url shortcut in the folder it will render the webpage at that url to pdf. it's a bit more of a pain if you want to do realtime rendering but works excellent for generating mass reports in batches that you want to post up to a website or email later.