.NET open PDF in winform without external dependencies

Question

Is there a FREE library which will allow me to open a pdf and show it on a winform project. I know I could open it in adobe reader or something but it always seems so bloate

Answer 1

The ActiveX control installed with acrobat reader should work, either drop it in via the designer or use something like this.

This will require the relevant version of the reader is installed on the client but since you indicate that you could just launch that anyway this should not be a problem. reader

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

I'm not sure what you call a 'dependency' since you'll always have to rely on some external code to render the PDF unless you bundle the whole PDF rendering source inside your project.

There are some commercial renderers and very few free ones.

If you want to avoid dependencies that you can't bundle then maybe you could have a look at the source code for SumatraPDF, an OpenSource PDF viewer for windows that uses MuPDF.
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.

Most other open source libraries are only used for creating and managing PDF pages and I don't know any that actually does rendering; it's such a hard problem to solve right.

You may still 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 .Net.

Have a look at this SO question I answered today.
It contains some more information and a link to some working .Net code I posted on another forum a few months ago.

Answer 4

You can use Spire.PDFViewer from Nuget. See here

Answer 5

There is a free PDF library. It is mainly editing the contents but it might help.

Answer 6

This is a guess.

The way browser render PDF inside it with a plug-in. I am not sure whether it requires the application to be installed.

You can use Foxit reader OR Sumatra PDF.
And, you can host the browser control on your winform.