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).
Related
I have a project from my lecture to create a web apps to read and analyze a pdf file based on keywords. What kind of programming language that I can use?
Example : I need to find or check some keywords or data on the pdf file. If the keyword or data is exist and available, the result is true.
I usually work in javascript so could answer you in that, I had a great help from the below conversation, it might be a good help for you too.
extract text from pdf in Javascript
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)
I am looking for some opensource suggestions for a CMS which facilitates alot of pdf files. I have thousands of pdf files and I would like to use a CMS which makes handling these files as easy as possible.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Plone has great support for binary files like PDFs: upload, download, manage security/access restrictions, manage caching of them and have the PDF's full-text indexed for search out of the box.
I don't know your requirements, but if I were you, I'd store an editable copy of the CMS content (in HTML) and render it each time it is saved.
To render HTML in the best manner possible, use a tool like WKHTMLTOPDF - easily connected to PHP.
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.
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.