I need to build a small PDF library that will display many catalogs, the user will be able to view the document and go thru pages but he will not be able to download or share the documents in any way, somehow to work like Google Books (here an example).
I have in mind something like the Google Drive API or some kind of Scribd API, but I don't know if one of those will work, I would like to know if there are more options for these application or the mentioned before will do the job.
Edit: Forgot to mention, all this done in a web browser.
In principle all you need would be the ability to render pages from a PDF file into an image. Your application (you didn't mention where you want to build this) is then responsible for displaying the images, scrolling, moving from page to page etc...
If this is correct there are multiple possible libraries that can do this:
- ImageMagick can convert PDF to images (http://www.imagemagick.org)
- GhostScript has extensions for PDF and can convert PostScript or PDF into images and other formats (http://www.ghostscript.com)
- I'm sure there are many, many more...
There are also a number of commercial tools, for example those from Adobe (licensed through DataLogics, http://www.datalogics.com) and callas software (http://www.callassoftware.com - I'm affiliated with this company)
Related
I want to implement an iOS application which views PDF files. I have used vfr/Reader in some other applications before. But now i need to display multimedia supported PDF files on iOS which include videos, animations etc. My customer create these PDFs by using InDesign.
I made a research and can not found a proper iOS based framework to achieve this. There are really limited number of solutions like Adobe, FastPDFKit etc but they are so expensive and there is no "one time fee" option.
Do you have any open source suggestions or the ones with lower prices?
EDIT: Made a research for days and days but there is no solution. Is there any other tool to create interactive ebooks or magazines? May be HTML5 or something with editor itself???
I have used QLPreviewController before to open local PDF files and it works great and it not hard to implement-- and it supports multiple documents.
Heres a good tutorial that I followed:
http://mobiledevelopertips.com/data-file-management/preview-documents-with-qlpreviewcontroller.html
I have not tested viewing videos or anything-- the PDFs I had were simple. But it is an Apple control and has all of the basic PDF viewing functions like pinch to zoom, but like I said my PDFs only had text but it is worth a shot to try.
After a long long research and discussions, unfortunately there is no free solution with these features. There are only paid solutions and Adobe Publishing Suite takes the head although it is one of the most expensive solutions
I've been looking for ways by which I can generate Thumbnails from pdf, as shown in the explorer. But the problem is that without Adobe Pro, the free version does not expose all ihe COM interfaces. Is there any other way? please help.
Ghostscript (which is what ImageMagick uses) will generate images in a wide variety of different image formats... if you need something really obscure then use the imagemagick wrapper, otherwise, I prefer the straight dope.
If you can afford a commercial option, you could use Amyuni PDF Creator ActiveX for this task, (or .Net version if that suits your needs better). Using this product you can create jpg/png/bmp images from the first page of your PDF files with the specified resolution, and then use them as thumbnails.
Disclaimer: I am part of the development team of this product.
Here are other SO questions proposing other approaches (not involving COM):
Using ImageMagic in command line
Thumbnail of a PDF page (Java)
I have a client that wants to put their course materials, which are already in PDF format into the iBook PDF section on the iPhone/iPad devices. I have loaded one of the PDFs and it looks great but the process is very manual and the end users are not very tech savvy or patient.
Is there a way where I can provide a link on a website that will either load the PDF into their iBook catalog if they are navigating from the device(iPhone/iPad) or load it into iTunes if they are on their PC?
As an aside would you think that a single iBook PDF would be preferrable to 26 different iBook PDFs, the course materials are currently broken into lessons. The initial download times would pretty much be the same, if there is an automated process. The concern for me is the order the PDFs are displayed on the device and that the library would look cluttered and make the overall experience less than ideal.
I answer this for completeness purposes. There is not currently (9/2010) an automated process for installing a book into iBooks, there are a couple of apps that you can install on your iPhone/iPad and you can always import into your iTunes.
If something changes in the future I will update this answer.
I have a lot of different sites written in PHP (Drupal) and more and more often clients ask me to create PDFs of various lists, product descriptions and so on.. I've been using dompdf and other pdf libraries but they are a pain to use and have a very limited functionality.
Are there any services out there that'll let me generate a PDF file from a URL and let the user download the result? That would definitely save my day :)
Best regards,
Thomas
If you are trying to convert html to PDF, then there are a couple of services out there which can do that for you (search), but from the top of my head a2ps does a pretty ok job. The basic idea if that if you can generate PostScript from your source, then creating a PDF is not an issue.
If you are looking for a more feature full library then iText can do it (Java though and not free for commercial use).
I've got a content management solution where we present scanned images (TIFF), PDFs, word docs for viewing. While we can simply embed a PDF, sometimes depending on user preferences it's a bit fiddly and sometimes not user-intuitive.
I'd like a solution like scribd, embedit, etc, but not hosted. I want to run the application on our own servers and manage it that way (for legal reasons, and our clients won't buy the service if it's hosted somewhere else).
SWFtools looks a little basic for my needs, plus doesn't do doc, docx or ppt.
Any options? Doesn't have to be free, but would be ideal.
As far as I understand (Scribd) uses swftools. And it is not basic, it is amazingly flexible. Convert everything into PDF and use swftools to convert PDF's into swf or something like Scribd does (SCB, what they call it, modified swf).
webSupergoo has a .net component that will do this...
Their ABCpdf component can import and export a wide range of graphic and document formats, including those you've mentioned.
The installation also contains an SWF demo project that can be freely adapted, and used as the basis for a scribd-like service.
http://www.websupergoo.com/products.htm
you can try this alternative solution :
FreepapeR.
You can display pdf documents. The pdf is converted using swftools (pdf2swf), using php on the server side or locally by hand, the user interface is written in as3.
Hope this helps...