[c#] How to render pdfs using C#

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.

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.

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

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.

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&\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.

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();
            }
        }
    }
}

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.

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.

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/

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.

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: