PDF preview in a c++ application

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hans Stoessel
  • Start date Start date
H

Hans Stoessel

Hi

In my C++ application (no MFC) I have a dialog and like to show a PDF
preview in this dialog.

How can I do that?

Thanks
Hans
 
You can launch Acrobat Reader as an external application, using
::ShellExecute("open", ...). Or you can embed the Acrobat Reader ActiveX
control in your application, but it has several bugs that make your life
quite difficult, and the functionality provided by the ActiveX control
is very thin (all can do little more than load a file and navigate to a
certain page).

The most comprehensive solution with the greatest degree of control is
by using the Adobe Acrobat API to write an Acrobat plugin. The way it
works is it renders the page for you on an HDC that you pass to the API.
You have to do inter-process communication between the Acrobat plugin
and your app. The drawback of this solution is that there's virtually no
documentation (other than the over thousand-page SDK reference from
Adobe), no newsgroups where you can expect help from other programmers,
and no sample applications that show you how to do it (and believe me,
it's enormously overcomplicated). In addition, the SDK is only free for
the full version of Acrobat. If you want to write a plugin for the free
Acrobat Reader, you have to pay over thousand dollars in license fees
(don't quite remember exactly how much).

Tom
 
12 May 2006 16:57:07 +0200 said:
In my C++ application (no MFC) I have a dialog and like to show a PDF preview in this dialog.

How can I do that?
Click to expand...

You can try the following link.
It's a free utility to convert any text file to PDF format.

It provides also: pdflib.dll pdflib.lib pdflib.h
This library is free for personal usage and
requires a license for commercial products.

http://www.codeproject.com/tools/Text2PDF.asp

__
JF Jolin
 
Hi

Thanks for the answer.

I should only open an existing PDF and should show it in a window (device
context; CDC). Maybe I can render the PDF into a bitmap and show the bitmap.

Is there a possibility to do that?

Thanks
Hans
 
Hans said:
I should only open an existing PDF and should show it in a window (device
context; CDC). Maybe I can render the PDF into a bitmap and show the bitmap.

Is there a possibility to do that?
Click to expand...

Yes, using the Acrobat SDK. You have to write a plugin for Acrobat.
Since Acrobat is running in a separate process than your application,
you need to use inter-process communication between them to pass the
HDC. Note that you don't have to open an Acrobat window to do this. You
can render a PDF page right on an HDC. It takes a while to learn the
Acrobat SDK, it's enormously complicated, and if you do a google search
on any of the SDK functions, you'll usually get exactly 0 hits.

Then there's the DocuCom PDF Core Library, which is a 3rd party library
that mimics the Acrobat SDK functionality. The advantage of it is that
it doesn't require any Adobe product to be installed.

Then there's always GhostScript, which is able to rasterize a PDF file
(create a .bmp or .tif for you). However, it's always a bit behind the
latest Adobe technology, and I have several perfectly valid PDF files
that GhostScript can't handle very well. Also, it's only free for
personal and academic use, you can't distribute it with your commercial
product without obtaining a license.

Also, there are several print drivers out there that create a .tif file
out of anything printable. There's Black Ice and LeadTools, just to name
two. Then you can make Acrobat print to this virtual printer to
rasterize a PDF file.

Tom
 
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