This question has been asked several times but my situation is a little different.
I have a web application written in C# where I get a string value passed to this page I'm working on. This string value represents a filename of a PDF file I need to display on this page. I'm supposed to have a left panel where I have some information displayed, and a right panel showing the contents of a PDF file. I'm using a simple table here to separate the panels. All PCs should already have Acrobat Reader installed.
My question is simple. How can I display the contents of the PDF file within this table? I don't need anything fancy. It has to be free and simple enough for a newbie like me to set up. It could even be written in jQuery/AJAX, if there even is a way.
I've looked at a Webbrowser control within an ASP.NET page, but it looks way too complicated for a simple viewer. I looked at Webparts, but I'm not sure if that's doable in a non-Sharepoint environment. Suggestions?
Have you tried the object tag? More ideas are here Make PDF display inline instead of separate Acrobat Reader window
Related
I use ITextSharp to create a PDF with form data based on another PDF.
The problem is the file generated is not editable (the form on it).
If I use ITextSharp in append mode, I get the form editable but most of the form data is not preserved. I want the user to see the resulted PDF with the PDF Form data preserved.
I understand there is NOTHING I can do. The only way for the user to edit the resulted PDF is to use a paid Acrobat version on it. This is because I CHANGE the PDF file by entering form data and setting fonts on it.
Is there something I can do?
Paul
Your question isn't very clear, but here are some answers to similar questions that have been asked before:
End users can't edit a form locally unless the form is "reader-enabled". Making a form reader-enabled is only possible when you use Adobe software: "Adding Enable for commenting Adobe Reader" using Acrobat
You need to fill out reader-enabled forms in append mode if you don't want to break the reader-enabling: Pdf with Acroform editing using iText
This doesn't mean you can't ask people to fill out a PDF form to gather data. See
Edit pdf embedded in the browser and save the pdf directly to server
You can capture that data, and fill out the form without flattening if you want to serve this form (including the data) to the end user: How to fill out a pdf file programmatically?
I'm pretty sure one of these question is a duplicate of what you're asking, but since your question isn't clear, it's hard to mark your question as an exact duplicate of one of them.
Short answer: No
Pdf file are likely to be secure (read only) and this is why everyone is using it. Most of the time, we convert a file into a pdf so maybe if you can get the 'file' and not the pdf will be a good move there.
From my experience in the past, I can confirm with you that iTextSharp may not convert all your data properly and this can make your generated file unusable. If not, you might have some weird line or some changes in the document behavior (ex. fields are not editable anymore).
If you really want to work with pdf file as input and do your stuff with it, you will need to understand the inner structure of it:
[PDF file format]
http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/pdf-file-format-basic-structure/
This can be a hell of a ride. You might need to re-consider the use of a pdf as input. If you can't change that, you might need to use some sort of adobe pluging to do so. Alot of third party pdf library is doing that.
Good luck
Apparently a question about Printing HTML in A4 and A5 format is the exact same thing as asking about Printing RTF formatted text, so here's another question with the details a bit more laid out.
I am developing a C# (WinForms) program that should print orders. This program is written for the .NET 2.0 framework. The program has to be able to print in both A4 and A5 paper formats, without any user interferrance (no dialogs). The printed order should look exactly like it does in a webbrowser. You can check out this sample if you like to see what it should look like. As you can see, very basic stuff.
Here's what I have tried so far:
Asking a question on StackOverflow, got closed for being a duplicate. Never found the duplicate.
Print with the WebBrowser element. Cannot print A5, so that was no solution.
Put the HTML in RichTextBox and print that. It worked, but it didnt show the HTML like it's viewed in a webbrowser, which is a requirement. Code can be found here.
I've looked into converting to PDF before printing, but that is either expensive or just impossible to use (for me, as a programmer with little C# experience). These tools usually rely on software being installed on the users' computer (like Acrobat Reader for printing), which I'm trying to avoid.
Viewed about every relevant link in Google for at least 13 pages, no luck. I've been at this for about 2 and a half days now.
If someone has a (free) better way to print formatted HTML like it's viewed in the browser without user interferrence or external dependancies, please share. I really need this to work.
Please don't close this question, believe me when I say I actively searched for a solution or article that describes my problem. Some were relevant, but did not solve the problem that I'm having. I also used the advanced searched on this website, with no luck.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Note: When I say I never found the duplicate, I mean I never found the article that literally describes my problem.
You're going to have to bite the bullet and use a PDF library, there is no way you are going to be able to fully control the end printed result from HTML with so many different users, browsers and printers. I did printing to A4 for an internal business application, we had a very limited user base (maybe 5) and all printing to a specific printer, even then it was flaky at best. I don't believe there is a way to distinguish between A4 and A5 without user interference, i.e. they have to select paper size from the print options.
Suggest you take a look at PDF Sharp, Sharp PDF and iTextSharp , they are all OpenSource.
This can all be done from the server, i.e. nothing needs to be installed on the users machine. It should be possible to select the paper size using this (I am not 100% sure), but what the end user prints it on ultimately up to them.
I have done this successfully using the PrintHelper method described here. I used it to enable users in multiple locations to print barcode labels from a CMS system. The labels had strict requirements regarding layout, font size and positioning and all this was managed using HTML and CSS.
The PrinterHelper class works by passing it a webcontrol populated with the print data (I used a repeater to allow multiple labels) & the helper class builds a page in memory and opens the print dialog. You register your CSS like so:
pg.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(pg.GetType(),"LabelCSS","<link href=\"Styles/labelPrint.css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />");
One caveat though, it only worked with Firefox, and some settings had to be changed e.g. margins set to zero, but as the CMS required the use of that browser it wasn't a problem.
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.
I am trying to implement a feature where i open (suppose in iframe) a PDF file (multiple pages), Highlight a section of the document a get the page number (the one that is displayed in the PDF tool bar).
Eg: if the toolbar display 2/7 which means i am right now in page 2, i need to capture the page number information. Sounds simple but i am not able to get a .dll/function that exposes this property.
Any help would be grateful.Thanks.
I wouldn't think this would be possible, there's no way to control PDFs with JavaScript in the browser, which is what you'd need to do.
This article suggests the same: http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=43436.
Content of link:
in short, no, you can't do that.
really don't think JS can read properties of PDFs, since PDFs are viewed in the browser thru a plugin, ie a viewport for another application (for want of a better explanation).
You may be better trying a different route, such as generating the pages as images and implementing your own paging. Depends on your content and requirements, of course. ABCPDF from http://www.websupergoo.com/ is free (with a link-back), not sure if that's any help for you.
I'm using itextsharp to generate the PDFs, but I need to change some text dynamically.
I know that it's possible to change if there's any AcroField, but my PDF doen's have any of it. It just has some pure texts and I need to change some of them.
Does anyone know how to do it?
Actually, I have a blog post on how to do it! But like IanGilham said, it depends on whether you have control over the original PDF. The basic idea is you setup a form on the page and replace the form fields with the text you want. (You can style the form so it doesn't look like a form)
If you don't have control over the PDF, let me know how to do it!
Here is a link to the full post:
Using a template to programmatically create PDFs with C# and iTextSharp
I haven't used itextsharp, but I have been using PDFNet SDK to explore the content of a large pile of PDFs for localisation over the last few weeks.
I would say that what you require is absolutely achievable, but how difficult it is will depend entirely on how much control you have over the quality of the files. In my case, the files can be constructed from any combination of images, text in any random order, tables, forms, paths, single pixel graphics and scanned pages, some of which are composed from hundreds of smaller images. Let's just say we're having fun with it.
In the PDFTron way of doing things, you would have to implement a viewer (sample available), and add some code over a text selection. Given the complexities of the format, it may be necessary to implement a simple editor in a secondary dialog with the ability to expand the selection to the next line (or whatever other fundamental object is used to make up text). The string could then be edited and applied by copying the entire page of the document into a new page, replacing the selected elements with your new string. You would probably have to do some mathematics to get this to work well though, as just about everything in PDF is located on the page by means of an affine transform.
Good luck. I'm sure there are people on here with some experience of itextsharp and PDF in general.
This question comes up from time to time on the mailing list. The same answer is given time and time again - NO. See this thread for the official answer from the person who created iText.
This question should be a FAQ on the itextsharp tag wiki.