Is there some kind of light-weight (non-Adobe) control I could use to view and print PDF documents on a web form?
I use Foxit. Lightweight - loads faster than Adobe.
ABCPdf is a free PDF generator for ASP.NET; all you have to do is link back to their site if you use it.
http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-1.htm
Flashpaper, it is platform independant.
The reason I suggest this is that you can embed PDF viewing right in any web-browser via this Flash Plugin (and print), but never have to have PDF viewing software installed or configured to work with the web browser.
Edit: As per the comment, new Flashpaper versions have been discontinued. Flashpaper will continue to be available for sale though. (see link in comment). I have used it for several years and haven't found much of a need for new features, but your case may differ. Try it out.
Foxit Reader is more lightweight than the Adobe Reader.
For displaying a PDF, you could use PDF Me Not.
I'm not sure if you mean generating a PDF of a form submission, though. If this is what you meant, there are PDF libraries for just about every language (such as FPDF for PHP).
For the first case, there's also AlivePDF which is open source.
Aspose.com can do some pretty nifty stuff for .NET and Java
phpLiveDocx and LiveDocx are completely free and can be used to merge data (for example, from a web form) with a template from MS Word or Open Office on the server.
phpLiveDocx runs on Linux, Windows and Mac.
LiveDocx runs on Windows.
Learn more at:
http://www.phplivedocx.org/articles/brief-introduction-to-phplivedocx/
http://www.livedocx.com
Related
Can anybody show me simple working example using Qt(export DLL plugin file) and make it work with NPAPI. I want simple example to test it in Google Chrome. Any links, codes ...
Thank you
There's a nice framework called Firebreath for writing cross-platform browser plugins in C++. It comes with plenty of documentation and example projects, so it's easy to get started. As a plus, in addition to NPAPI hosts you pretty much get free support for ActiveX browsers (Internet Explorer) too.
http://www.firebreath.org
Check out the QtBrowserPlugin solution, http://doc.qt.nokia.com/solutions/4/qtbrowserplugin/developingplugins.html
There you should find information about writing your own NPAPI plugins.
Update:
I did not realize there was no useful link to the source, it can be found in gitorious at
http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-solutions/ to browse online http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-solutions/qt-solutions/trees/master/qtbrowserplugin
I am looking for a text to speech component that i can use with as3/flex .
Thanks
I ported a HMM based TTS engine to Flash using the Alchemy compiler. Demos, explanation and code are here:
http://www.edobashira.com/2010/01/flitehts-engine-for-flash-hmm-speech_22.html
http://www.furui.cs.titech.ac.jp/~dixonp/hts/
I have an example of how to do this on my blog:
http://www.jamesward.com/2009/10/01/text-to-speech-in-flex/
I'm not sure if you mean to do it on the web or on the desktop. In fact, I didn't even know you could do it on the web until I saw James' reply up above.
I had done a TTS desktop application in Flash embedding the Flash ActiveX inside a C# application. The Flash movie sent a message to the shell using the ExternalInterface API, which in turn passed it on to a TTS ActiveX. I can't recall the name of the ActiveX we used, but there are several decent options to choose from. Turned out quite sweet.
we are making an application to run on both Mono and .Net. The application is web based, so it uses ASP.Net.
We are now trying to find some kind of reporting software. We would prefer if there was a designer that end users(non-programmers) would be able to use like Crystal Reports.
Currently, we are not finding anything that looks even barely capable. We will have shell access on the server that Mono is running from, so it doesn't matter if there is no true web-preview or something as long as it's capable of creating a PDF on the server in an automated way.
Has anyone seen any competent report writing software that runs on Mono? (Also, licensing doesn't matter as long as it's not GPL)
edit:
Really, even running something that isn't Mono such as PHP or something else light on dependencies would be ok as long as it would run on *nix systems. I just am having trouble finding anything for non-windows systems for the server and Windows systems for the designer(this is the justification for the linux tag)
We've finally found a reporting solution. It's not quite as pretty as Crystal or something like that, but it works, and that's what counts.
It is called FlexCel.Net http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/flexcelnet.asp
You basically design reports in Excel using special markup(actually, you can even design reports in OpenOffice cause thats what I had to do cause there is something wrong with Excel licensing for me)
It's pretty powerful and cheap, about $200 USD. I have already gotten a demo to run on Mono after about 5 hours of tinking and trying to understand how the demos worked. It's pretty neat though and well put together from what I've seen.. I'll come back and edit this answer if we later decide that this software is not good and we don't recommend it.
They commercially support running their software on Mono(except for the Winforms portions) and you also get full source code, so it really is a good deal. The range name = reporting band is a bit strange in the template, but it's still seeming better the more we use it.
Have a look at itextsharp
Your users can create PDF documents with fields, and then you can use the itextsharp library to populate it.
One thing I have been looking at recently is Jasper reports. Its just like Crystal Reports, and with JasperServer users can connect to it using the iReport editor. The hurdle I have is getting it to play nice with Mono See Running report on JasperServer from C#
I am trying to write a web base document management system(ASP.NET,C#),now i need to show thumbnails of recived files when users viewing them.Thanks for any solutions...
Try here for starters - http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2007/10/au-handouts-t-1.html
This is a good AutoCAD programming blog in general. FYI, DWG Trueview is free. I don't know if the COM interface is still accessible but it's worth a try.
You could try using the software available from the Open Design Alliance.
Open Design Alliance
The last time that I was trying to use the DWG TrueView program (connecting to the COM interface) it was pretty flaky, things might have improved.
What's the best way for determining whether the user's browser can view PDF files?
Ideally, it shouldn't matter on the browser or the operating system.
Is there a specific way of doing it in ASP.NET, or would the answer be just JavaScript?
Neither, none, don't try.
Re dawnerd: Plug-in detection is not the right answer. I do not have a PDF plugin installed in my browser (Firefox on Ubuntu), yet I am able to view PDF files using the operating system's document viewer (which is not Acrobat Reader).
Today, any operating system that can run a web browser can view PDF files out of the box.
If a specific system does not have a PDF viewer installed and the browser configured to use it, that likely means that either it's a hand-made install of Windows, a very trimmed down alternate operating system, or something really retro.
It is reasonable to assume that in any of those situation the user will know what a PDF file is and either deliberately choose not to be able to view them or know how to install the required software.
If I am deluding myself, I would love to have it explained to me in which way I am wrong.
A quick google search found this. Useful for all kinds of plugins.
There are users that choose not to open PDF's in the browser and disable the plugin (this allows the file to be opened in the native application external of the browser window). It is better to let the user know that software is required to open something (whether it be PDF or not) than try to detect whether the plugin is available.
Another problem with detection is that what you need to look for changes from version to version (for example, see: "PDF.PdfCtrl.*" vs "AcroPDF.PDF.*" for the Adobe PDF viewer) and different browser implementations (the previously mentioned strings are used in IE for example, while Firefox uses a totally different manner of detection. Then we need to think of Opera and Safari and ???). Also, there are different vendors (think Foxit and Ghostscript, though I am not sure if they supply a plugin for the browser) where there may be differences in detecting the plugin.
For a script written in 2008 and some more information about the caveats see Detecting plugins in Internet Explorer (and a few hints for all the others).
After initially ignoring the advise on this page the architect went ahead with Acrobat detection, causing an inevitable support nightmare.
As ddaa mentions not all the scenarios can be accurately captured with Plug-in detection. Some users, for example, may choose to view PDF files with FoxIt Reader rather than acrobat. Some user's browsers don't flag that they are Acrobat ready, and certainly not always in the same way.
A better solution would have been to give the user a choice on how they'd like to view the relevant document. Personally, I don't like to have any website rely on a plug-in - it spoils the beauty of the web.