How to render pdfs using C

Question

I want to load and draw pdf files graphically using C   I don t need to edit them or anything  just render them at a given zoom level   The pdf libraries I have found seem to be focussed on generation  How do I do this   Thanks

User · Accepted Answer

There are a few other choices in case the Adobe ActiveX isn't what you're looking for (since Acrobat must be present on the user machine and you can't ship it yourself).

For creating the PDF preview, first have a look at some other discussions on the subject on StackOverflow:

In the last two I talk about a few things you can try:

You can get a commercial renderer (PDFViewForNet, PDFRasterizer.NET, ABCPDF, ActivePDF, XpdfRasterizer and others in the other answers...).
Most are fairly expensive though, especially if all you care about is making a simple preview/thumbnails.
In addition to Omar Shahine's code snippet, there is a CodeProject article that shows how to use the Adobe ActiveX, but it may be out of date, easily broken by new releases and its legality is murky (basically it's ok for internal use but you can't ship it and you can't use it on a server to produce images of PDF).
You could have a look at the source code for SumatraPDF, an OpenSource PDF viewer for windows.
There is also Poppler, a rendering engine that uses Xpdf as a rendering engine. All of these are great but they will require a fair amount of commitment to make make them work and interface with .Net and they tend to be be distributed under the GPL.
You may want to consider using GhostScript as an interpreter because rendering pages is a fairly simple process.
The drawback is that you will need to either re-package it to install it with your app, or make it a pre-requisite (or at least a part of your install process).
It's not a big challenge, and it's certainly easier than having to massage the other rendering engines into cooperating with .Net.
I did a small project that you will find on the Developer Express forums as an attachment.
Be careful of the license requirements for GhostScript through.
If you can't leave with that then commercial software is probably your only choice.

User · Answer

You can add a NuGet package CefSharp WinForms to your application and then add a ChromiumWebBroweser control to your form  In the code you can write   chromiumWebBrowser1 Load filePath     This is the easiest solution I have found  it is completely free and independent of the user s computer settings like it would be when using default WebBrowser control

User · Answer

Use the web browser control  This requires Adobe reader to be installed but most likely you have it anyway  Set the UrL of the control to the file location

User · Answer

Here is my answer from a different question   First you need to reference the Adobe Reader ActiveX Control  Adobe Acrobat Browser Control Type Library 1 0   programfiles amp  Common Files Adobe Acrobat ActiveX AcroPDF dll  Then you just drag it into your Windows Form from the Toolbox   And use some code like this to initialize the ActiveX Control   private void InitializeAdobe string filePath        try               this axAcroPDF1 LoadFile filePath           this axAcroPDF1 src   filePath          this axAcroPDF1 setShowToolbar false           this axAcroPDF1 setView  FitH            this axAcroPDF1 setLayoutMode  SinglePage            this axAcroPDF1 Show              catch  Exception ex                throw            Make sure when your Form closes that you dispose of the ActiveX Control  this axAcroPDF1 Dispose    this axAcroPDF1   null    otherwise Acrobat might be left lying around

User · Answer

The easiest lib I have used is Paolo Gios s library  It s basically   Create GiosPDFDocument object Create TextArea object Add text  images  etc to TextArea object Add TextArea object to PDFDocument object Write to stream   This is a great tutorial to get you started

User · Answer

ABCpdf will do this and many other things for you   Not ony will it render your PDF to a variety of formats  eg JPEG  GIF  PNG  TIFF  JPEG 2000  vector EPS  SVG  Flash and PostScript  but it can also do so in a variety of color spaces  eg Gray  RGB  CMYK  and bit depths  eg 1  8  16 bits per component     And that s just some of what it will do   For more details see   http   www websupergoo com abcpdf-8 htm  Oh and you can get free licenses via the free license scheme   There are EULA issues with using Acrobat to do PDF rendering  If you want to go down this route check the legalities very carefully first

User · Answer

You could google for PDF viewer component  and come up with more than a few hits    If you don t really need to embed them in your app  though - you can just require Acrobat Reader or FoxIt  or bundle it  if it meets their respective licensing terms  and shell out to it  It s not as cool  but it gets the job done for free

User · Answer

Google has open sourced its excellent PDF rendering engine - PDFium - that it wrote with Foxit Software   There is a C  nuget package called PdfiumViewer which gives a C  wrapper around PDFium and allows PDFs to be displayed and printed   I have used it and was very impressed with the quality of the rendering     PDFium works directly with streams so it doesn t require any data to be written to disk   This is my example from a WinForms app      public void LoadPdf byte   pdfBytes                var stream   new MemoryStream pdfBytes           LoadPdf stream             public void LoadPdf Stream stream                   Create PDF Document         var pdfDocument   PdfDocument Load stream               Load PDF Document into WinForms Control         pdfRenderer Load pdfDocument             Edit  To get the pdfRenderer control in WinForm  Add the PdfiumViewer NuGet package to the project  open the projects packages folder in Windows Explorer and drag the PdfiumViewer dll file onto the Toolbox window  A control called PdfRenderer will be available to add

User · Answer

This looks like the right thing  http   code google com p lib-pdf

User · Answer

Dynamic PDF Viewer from ceTe software might do what you re looking for   I ve used their generator software and was pretty happy with it   http   www dynamicpdf com

User · Answer

PdfiumViewer is great  but relatively tightly coupled to System Drawingand WinForms  For this reason I created my own wrapper around PDFium  PDFiumSharp  Pages can be rendered to a PDFiumBitmap which in turn can be saved to disk or exposed as a stream  This way any framework capable of loading an image in BMP format from a stream can use this library to display pdf pages   For example in a WPF application you could use the following method to render a pdf page   using System Linq  using System Windows  using System Windows Media  using System Windows Media Imaging  using PDFiumSharp   static class PdfRenderer       public static ImageSource RenderPage string filename  int pageIndex  string password   null  bool withTransparency   true                using  var doc   new PdfDocument filename  password                         var page   doc Pages pageIndex               using  var bitmap   new PDFiumBitmap  int page Width   int page Height  withTransparency                                 page Render bitmap                   return new BmpBitmapDecoder bitmap AsBmpStream    BitmapCreateOptions None  BitmapCacheOption OnLoad  Frames First

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