API to convert document of different formats to Pdf - pdf

I need a API to convert any type of document to Pdf (free or purchase). Kindly suggest me efficient API provided by any vendor.
Thanking You

You didn't specify what your platform is, so try this platform agnostic one I worked on. Examples: Java, C#, VB.net. The API is web services based and supports a large number of file formats with perfect fidelity.

Related

On-demand publishing api?

Lulu.com is a "self-publishing" service.
It appears that they used to have an api, but it is no longer offered.
I was wondering if there are any similar services in which I could use a scripting language to generate book documents (pdf, xml, whatever), and programatically place individual orders for custom books.
There is probably not an API out there for auto-converting a non-ebook format to an ebook format.
I recently attended a discussion on publishing at a software development conference. There was much discussion regarding the process of generating/converting documents to PUB-format and other e-Book formats. Apparently, it's not as simple as clicking "convert." There is a lot of manual typesetting and tweaking that has to be done to get a PDF (or .DOC, or whatever) to look right as an e-book.

Are there any services out there that will let me convert an URL to PDF and let the user download the result?

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).

Anyway to automatically convert DWF to PDF?

Our eTendering solution, www.monaqasat.com, currently works exclusively with PDF documents for various reasons, some of them being security. We are being asked if we can support DWF documents. For this to happen, we would need to find a way to automatically convert DWF documents to PDF, using some kind of Unix application.
Does anybody know any such application, preferably using Rails or Java?
Thanks,
.Karim
http://www.autodwg.com/pdf/
http://www.dwgto.com/
http://www.aidecad.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/category/pdf/
Suggestion would be to install a software printer call its APIs and pass dwf and get back pdf and then apply security as needed.
Autodesk has its DWF Toolkit available at
http://www.autodesk.com/dwftoolkit
It contains full source code in C++ to read & write DWF files, so it should be reasonably easy to make it run under Linux and to use a PDF library to write the output.

A technology for reading pdfs online with annotations?

is there an open source solution that displays PDFs for online reading? It has to be searchable much like google books and if possible has the ability to display annotations?
By "online reading" I'll assume you mean without a PDF reader plugin on the client. In that case you'll need to convert to HTML
http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/
If you don't mind losing the ability to copy text then converting to PNG may give you a more accurate rendering
http://www.imagemagick.org/
Regardless of the output format you can manage your searching using the original PDF data. One technology for this is mnogosearch
http://www.mnogosearch.org/
Monogosearch uses pdftotext internally, you may find this useful if you want to write your own search routines. pdftotext is part of the Xpdf suite of utilities
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/about.html
All of the tools listed above are available on Windows or Linux
You may also be interested in the Vuzit DocuPub Platform: http://vuzit.com/products/docupub_platform
The display technology itself is not open source, but they provide an API to access their service, so perhaps it is worth investigating.
Don't know if you are looking a software to install or some service to pay for...
I've read a lot about www.getbackboard.com (this is not advertising, only reporting something I've read about, that maybe fits your needs.. ;)
Not sure if they do annotations, but both of these will show PDFs quite well:
http://pdfmenot.com
http://docs.google.com
ICEPdf recently released their code as open source. It is Java based.
PyPdf is really nice. It supports reading the text as well as encryption which I know that itextsharp does not.
Of course you'd have to program in python as IronPython's class libraries aren't quite to the point where you can ref them from another language and use them. (But I imagine they will be someday soon)
PyPdf
This is not open source, but check it out anyways. You can download a free trial of their SDK to try it out. Reading PDF's and their annotations is not simple and I wouldn't trust a production app to open source decoders.
Here is an online demo.
http://www.atalasoft.com/ajaxannotations/default.aspx
Another good pdf reader is FoxitReader.

Tools to manipulate doc file and convert them to pdf

I am looking for some good tools (free or paid, though free tool is always preferred)
for doing following operations on word doc files:
Manipulation of doc/docx/text files (like replacing some placeholders with DB values) as well as
converts doc files to .pdf
Because, I will be using this tool in my WCF service library,
So I am looking for a code library and not for a GUI based product.
Please share your experience regarding same.
Thank you!
Aspose has a decent collection of MS Office and PDF manipulation libraries.
Aspose Homepage
On the off chance that you're only looking for PDFs for viewing or archival purposes, you could also setup a PDF print driver and print your office files into a given location using Automation. You could also edit Office files through Automation although this may be tedious.
VSTO would give you access to the save as PDF from the Office applications.
Please see my answer to a related question on SO where I recommend a number of ways to convert your Word document to a format that is more easy to manipulate programmatically (using XSL-FO).