I am using CGContextDrawPDFPage to draw pdfs in a layer using standard techniques as mentioned here . The PDF Viewing is perfect for most of the pdfs. However FreeText Annotations in the PDF are not rendered at all. QLPreviewController successfully displays them but i can't use it as its not customizable for my use cases. Is there a way to Render Free Text Annotations using CGPDF?
I'm actually surprised that you managed to create annotations that are rendered by Apple's QLPreviewController. It uses CorePDF under the hood (just like Safari/UIWebView) and as of iOS 7 has some support for PDF annotations, as long as they are backed by appearance streams, however in our experimentation (and I work in the PDF space since 2010 on the PSPDFKit SDK) most annotations are not rendered with Apple's library, not even as of iOS 9.3.
We submitted a few radars against this behaviour as it often comes up on support, when people use our PDF product to annotate documents on their iPad and then send it via email and other people open it via Mail.app on another iOS device and can't see the annotations. We even wrote a support article for this behaviour.
Alternatively, you can flatten your document and render the annotations as part of the PDF content. This makes them no longer editable (unless you edit the content stream directly) but will be correctly rendered even by less capable renders such as Apple's CoreGraphics PDF engine. There are many products on the server that allow that such as iText, and our own SDK can do that via the PSPDFProcessor class.
Related
I have a website with the following structure:
Tab Container - having 4 Tab panels
Each tab panels is having 4 gridviews which are separated by line break.
Now when i am in a particular tab, I want to use an 'export to pdf' button , which should generate a pdf having 4 gridviews visible in this tabpanel. Same for all other tabpanels.
I have searched enough, found may articles telling about using itextsharp, wkhtmltopdf, pdf generators etc, however I dont seems to find fully implemented functionality anywhere.
Can anyone guide/suggest anything ?
I always use wkhtmltopdf to convert a html page to pdf. (you will need server access to install it though)
It works very well, looks the same as the web site and saves text as actual text (in vectors).
I've used CutePDF's API and they seem to work pretty well.
http://www.cutepdf.com/Solutions/
You can do this in two ways, either handle it on your server or use a third party service.
If you want to convert a html page to a PDF on your server, you can use wkhtmltopdf (A simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt.) I haven't used it with .NET however have seen many examples.
If you like to use a third-party service www.impdf.com could be used, It's a free service. You do not need to register even. I once have used it but not for a long time( I later switched to wkhtmltopdf get some performance gain).
It depends on your requirements which method you must use. In any case if using impdf is enough for you,
Convert this page to a PDF
A4 page: impdf.com?url=http://www.yourwebsite.com&--page-size=A4
Letter page: impdf.com?url=http://www.yourwebsite.com&--page-size=Letter
Adobe ColdFusion has a tag called <CFPDF> built in.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/10.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7995.html
Furthermore it has web services which which can bridge the gap to ASP.Net
How do you minimize the pain in your development process when it comes to reporting?
For web frameworks, there is a pretty straightforward way to both produce content as well as graphically design it; content is represented semantically through HTML, and the design is separately specified through CSS. And browsers are fairly consistent with how they render the output (and the inconsistencies are well-known and can be planned for). There are even WYSIWYG editors to help out less-CSS-savvy graphical designers.
But what do we do about print content?
At one company, I created a process that worked like this: A script generated a semantic representation through XML. The XML was passed through XSLT to generate an XML-FO document. Then, this was passed to another tool (Apache FOP, I believe) to generate a PDF. This worked well for that company.
At this company, however, output appearance matters to management, and we have a graphical designer. Currently, we are using a reporting tool (XtraReports from Developer Express, version 8.1). It isn't bad; it outputs to a variety of formats, has a WYSIWYG designer, reports are implemented through C# classes, and it supports data binding to data sets (unfortunately, not POCO's). However, we have some major pain points with this setup:
The reporting framework has major limitations on how you can lay out and group your reporting bands
Presentable elements, especially charts, lack the capabilities we need to fine-tune and achieve the look of our mock-ups.
There is no good way to share styles and layout among reports akin to what we can get through CSS.
Good composability of reusable parts is very hard to implement. So we end up with a lot of copy & paste inheritance of functionality; this is bad news whenever we need to make sweeping changes across all reports.
Now, maybe there's some kick-ass framework out there that can eliminate the pains of reporting frameworks, but I assume that they all have their weaknesses. Do you have a framework or process that works well for you and reduces the pain points inherent in reporting?
Prince XML is a really cool tool which allows you to use HTML or XML styled with CSS (including CSS paged media for printing) and generate PDFs from it.
Option #1 : Adobe Acrobat is really nice. You can design form enabled PDFs and then use something like PDFSharp to manipulate the PDF document. You can create template PDF's that you dump your generated stuff into. I've done this before and it was pretty successful. I also used POCO objects nicely.
Option #2 : You could start creating XPS documents, which is XML based anyways. And they can be easily converted to PDF if necessary.
Option #3 : Run for your life.(might not be an option)
i-net Clear Reports is a nice product. It's based on Java but you can also work with ASP.NET. There is a bridge. The .NET version is in work if you want work with POCO. Because the Java version can work with POJO that the coming .NET version will also work with POCO.
I've been having a heckuva time with this problem, and there seems to be a lot of noise out there in search engines in getting to the bottom of it, so forgive me if I've missed a silver bullet out there.
The base need is that I have to generate a PDF document that has both static and dynamic elements. I started to do this by having a PDF template with all the static content, and then I wanted to inject various dynamic elements into it. The problem is that PDFs are not meant to be manipulated that way, and depending on the size of the dynamic text I put in there, might overflow text on other pages. I was using iTextSharp but can't get past this problem.
A possible fallback is to generate a DOCX, which I've done before, and then convert it into a PDF on the backend. The only libraries I've found to do this are paid apps (like Aspose). There are examples out there that convert to PDF without these libraries, but they seem to require a client-side application. I'm doing this via IIS.
To make a long story longer...are there free libraries that will convert a DOCX file to a PDF server-side without launching client applications to do so?
There are a few choices here:
build a COM interop class that will perform read and 'Save As' functions on your .docx. The MSDN link you gave doesn't require to be run client-side, but rather have the Office assemblies in the GAC or in your ASP.NET's bin directory.
buy a third party component to do the work for you. Here's just one example with no guarantees.
I'm not familiar with any good free ones, but we used Aspose.Words to achieve something similar to what you describe. We keep Word templates with static text and mail-merge fields. The templates can be regular Word documents, they don't have to be .dot templates. Mail-merge fields can be either single fields or repeatable data in tables so you can easily generate pretty complex documents without doing dynamic document editing. (Which is always an option)
Using Aspose for this was so friction free that I would suggest using Aspose unless the cost (which is significant) is a show-stopper. The support is also good which is always an added bonus.
There are always some caveats...
I would have liked more control over the PDF compatability of the generated PDFs. We had some issues with older clients reading the generated PDFs.
Mail-merge is not fun. Complex mail-merge expressions was time consuming to get right.
I just found very simple solution to convert any files from command-line using LibreOffice:
soffice.exe --headless --convert-to pdf file.xls
(google for the rest)
I want to create reports that can be drilled down by the readers - but the reports have to be PDF. I have two options:
Link from the PDF to an online report tool
Make the reports themselves interactive
I like #2...
I believe I can do this with Adobe AIR (Flex, Flash + Adobe Reader 9 or higher).
There are tools that can create PDF documents programatically (AIR?, AlivePDF)
There are frameworks in Adboe that are ideal for reports and charts (Flex)
And PDF documents can contain flash content (Adobe Reader 9+)
My questions are:
If I have an interactive Flash component in a PDF document and I go to print, what will print? Will the current view of he Flash print?
If I want to drill down, all the data has to be in the PDF document (it has to be stand alone). This is fine... but how to do I put the data in the PDF programatically? Is this done with Flex and AlivePDF?
I saw an online sample of an interactive charting report in a PDF document, but now I can't find it. :( I would love to find something again if you know of one.
I feel that I may have all the pieces, but not understanding correctly how they all go together. Any ideas?
Answer to question 3: Currently AlivePDF does not allow you to embed Flash content into a generated PDF. The generated PDFs can include text, images, simple graphics, and certain non-visual features such as bookmarks.
PDF's have JavaScript as a native control language now. With it, you can embed "links" that jump to other pages, etc.
Theoretically, you can call web services from within a PDF using JS and process the responses, perhaps even dynamically filling page areas.
BUT
PDF's are good for providing a document that looks and prints the same everywhere. They are also good for fill-in forms. They are NOT built for "drill-down" on the client side. Can you check the goals of the project to see why they want dynamic PDF's ? If they want portability (i.e. without a web connection), perhaps you can give them what they want with an AIR application and an XML file.
Cheers
we developed interactive content reports for PDF/flashpaper/etc using flex as a front-end but handle the actual report creation server-side using coldfusion's cfdocument/cfpdf (or Itext if we really need insane levels of placement/control/etc.). basically the user chooses the content & the cf app on the backend lays it out & sends back the report.
Does anyone think it is possible to build a Google Docs style PDF document viewer, which will convert a document to a format that doesn't require Adobe Reader on the client machine?
If so, any references to point to? Either a place that had done it, or an explanation of how to do it.
I've done a lot of research regarding this matter and I hope I can help.
Good old Macromedia used to market Flash Paper, which was supposed to be a PDF Adobe Reader killer as it allowed any webmaster to embed and display PDF docs online using Flash. But that was before they sold out to Adobe and Flash Paper was soon put on a shelf and forgotten in favor of Adobe's priorities.
However, Today there are a so many ground-breaking alternatives...
As a user has mentioned above you can use Scribd.com (the wanna-be YouTube for documents). But they're not the only service (and certainly not the ones most ahead of the curve).
Here are my two favorites:
Issuu (http://www.issuu.com)
Mygazines (http://www.mygazines.com/)
I enjoy Mygazines's flash user interface the most (it's also faster) but it costs $99. It's pretty impressive. Depending on what you want to do that price tag can be worth it.
Issuu however, has won me over recently with their Smartlook Platform: http://issuu.com/smartlook
Here's a sample of Smartlook setup on a website:
http://www.ismartlook.com/
Plus it's completely free, which is nice.
A third alternative, which I've considered using myself is this free and open source code made by this guy named samurajdata. He calls it psview (PostScript Viewer). Anyone can download the source code and see it in action here:
http://view.samurajdata.se/
The converted PDFs losses quality as it converts to image fie, but it's fast and easy to setup.
I hope this helps!
You may try Doconut.com looks pretty same as Google Docs viewer. It is available for asp.net 4.0, apart from PDF it can also show all office formats, tiff, dwg, psd etc.. However it is a paid library.
If I understand you correctly you only want to view these files and not edit them.
Google already makes a best effort at providing PDF files found in it's search results as HTML. This doesn't always work. You can try it out by setting up a gmail account, mailing all your PDF files to it, and then using all the "View attachment as HTML" links in the messages.
Your other options are to take the source material and make it into HTML as say LaTeX2HTML does for LaTeX documents, or to convert the PDF into one of: a raster image (tiff, DjVu, etc), or a vector image (PostScript, SVG, SWF).
If the input to this process starts with the PDF files, you have very limited options, especially if the contents of the PDFs are just raster images (say scanned pages).
Personally I'd advocate for creating the PDFs from their source and trying to use Flash Paper to create an SWF out of them too as Flash Paper will pretend to be a printer. Because some 98% of browsers have Flash 9 or greater.
Have you seen Scribd?
You can just use the Google Docs Viewer which also supports PDF documents. It allows you to embed it in your web page and point to the URL where the PDF is located (which doesn't have to be on the Google servers).
Example:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domain.com%2Fdocument.pdf
There is the Internet Archive BookReader available. It's a nice book viewer implemented in javascript (jQuery), so the client doesn't need a PDF reader nor Flash. Though it needs images for the book pages, you can easily connect it to your own image server, so you may try to convert a PDF to images via ASP.NET (or any other tool like XPDF). I found that this is simpler to implement than actually implementing an images viewer.
Also, it seems to support search highlighting (try it here), but I haven't investigated exactly which metadata are needed and in what format.
The last release file contains a simple example on how to use it. More details and examples can be found in the first link.
Try converting them from PDF to TIFF. Tiff supports multiple pages and is widely supported.
If formatting isn't that important, and your PDFs are structured right (ie actually contain text, not images of text), an alternate could be to convert to HTML. The tools from Aspose are pretty good.
I'm wondering why you would want to do that. PDF is such a general and widely supported format that if you try to avoid it you're limited to:
A more obscure or less well supported format (dvi, svg until it gets better support)
Converting to text/HTML like Google does with less than perfect results
Converting to an image format like TIFF which bumps up file sizes and removes all the niceties of PDF like real, selectable text and hyperlinks
If you don't want your users to have to install Adobe Reader (understandable), there are many free lightweight PDF viewers available (Foxit Reader for example), I'm sure many of these have browser embedding capabilities.
Am I missing something here? Google Docs DOES support PDF. Simply upload the PDF file.
Some other alternatives depending upon what you're looking to do:
RAD PDF - ASP.NET component for displaying PDF documents, forms, etc. Also allows PDF searching, bookmarks, text selection, and basic editing.
Atalasoft - ASP.NET component for image viewing, but also allows PDF use as an image. Doesn't support any PDF features beyond simple viewing.