OT: Replacement for Adobe Acrobat

3 Jan 2005 7:13 PM

Simon Verona

I'm using the free Adobe Acrobat ocx that comes with Acrobat (v6) to view
and print pdf's within a Windows Forms application. This works, pdf's
display and print fine. The problem is that acrobat takes several seconds
to start up when the pdf viewer form that I've written is first used, and
displays an annoying adobe splash screen. Also, prints take quite a long
time to render and spool.

I'm therefore looking for a control that I can use in place of the Acrobat
OCX.. One that can view and print a pdf. Ideally this should be free, but
realistically should have a reasonably low-cost developers licence and be
free of runtime licence.

Does anybody have any advice?

Regards
Simon

3 Jan 2005 7:37 PM

MuZZy

Simon Verona wrote:
Show quoteHide quote

> I'm using the free Adobe Acrobat ocx that comes with Acrobat (v6) to view
> and print pdf's within a Windows Forms application. This works, pdf's
> display and print fine. The problem is that acrobat takes several seconds
> to start up when the pdf viewer form that I've written is first used, and
> displays an annoying adobe splash screen. Also, prints take quite a long
> time to render and spool.
>
> I'm therefore looking for a control that I can use in place of the Acrobat
> OCX.. One that can view and print a pdf. Ideally this should be free, but
> realistically should have a reasonably low-cost developers licence and be
> free of runtime licence.
>
> Does anybody have any advice?
>
> Regards
> Simon
>

It helps to ask google sometimes :)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=.Net+pdf+component&btnG=Search

Good luck,
Andrey

3 Jan 2005 8:34 PM

Simon Verona

Thanks Muzzy..

The problem is that there are a mulititude of components available, at
wildly different prices.. Most have many more features than I need (I only
need to display and print a pdf!)....

I was hoping that someone could recommend a product, saving me the hassle of
trying out several evaluations...

regards
Simon
Show quoteHide quote

"MuZZy" <leyand***@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:TNKdnRnUrq9BA0TcRVn-rg@rcn.net...
> Simon Verona wrote:
>> I'm using the free Adobe Acrobat ocx that comes with Acrobat (v6) to view
>> and print pdf's within a Windows Forms application. This works, pdf's
>> display and print fine. The problem is that acrobat takes several
>> seconds
>> to start up when the pdf viewer form that I've written is first used, and
>> displays an annoying adobe splash screen. Also, prints take quite a long
>> time to render and spool.
>>
>> I'm therefore looking for a control that I can use in place of the
>> Acrobat
>> OCX.. One that can view and print a pdf. Ideally this should be free,
>> but
>> realistically should have a reasonably low-cost developers licence and be
>> free of runtime licence.
>>
>> Does anybody have any advice?
>>
>> Regards
>> Simon
>>
>
> It helps to ask google sometimes :)
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=.Net+pdf+component&btnG=Search
>
> Good luck,
> Andrey

4 Jan 2005 9:48 AM

Tommy

Our company also needed such a component: we first wanted to use PDF
for displaying and printing reports (generated by Reporting Services).
We've tried several components, but most of them couldn't display or
print PDFs with the same quality as Adobe Reader.
In the end, we decided not to use PDF as a format for viewing and
printing reports: we developed some classes and components, using the
EMF format. Now we can view (custom control with zooming, panning, ...)
and print (with Print Dialog or automatically, from code) using pure
managed code.

4 Jan 2005 10:23 AM

Simon Verona

hmmmm ok...

I'll see if I can find a way of converting pdf's to another format and use a
generic image viewer.. I'm just concerned about performance!! I have other
code that I've built that generates the pdf (i've used pdf as the format for
emailing) which takes a little time, and I'll need to convert back to
another format...

It would be useful just to keep it all as pdf though!!

Regards
Simon
Show quoteHide quote

"Tommy" <tommy.carl***@telenet.be> wrote in message
news:1104832093.695046.246800@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Our company also needed such a component: we first wanted to use PDF
> for displaying and printing reports (generated by Reporting Services).
> We've tried several components, but most of them couldn't display or
> print PDFs with the same quality as Adobe Reader.
> In the end, we decided not to use PDF as a format for viewing and
> printing reports: we developed some classes and components, using the
> EMF format. Now we can view (custom control with zooming, panning, ...)
> and print (with Print Dialog or automatically, from code) using pure
> managed code.
>

4 Jan 2005 11:38 AM

Tommy

If you're generating the PDF yourself, you could generate a different
format too. Instead of converting the generated PDF, you generate both
PDF and the different format, from the same source.
We still export to PDF, if a report has to be e-mailed. But if the
report only has to be viewed or printed from one of our applications,
we export to our own format (multipaged, compressed EMF).