PDF Previewing and viewing

Question

I\'m creating a document viewing web application. You log in and it takes you to a screen where you have all your docs listed on the left. I want to make it so that when y

Answer 1

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

• How can I take preview of documents?
• Get a preview jpeg of a pdf on windows?

If these don't answer your question, you can try a couple more things:

• You can get a commercial renderer (PDFViewForNet, PDFRasterizer.NET, ABCPDF, ActivePDF, ...).
  Most are fairly expensive though, especially if all you care about is making thumbnails.
• There is a CodeProject article that shows how to use the Adobe ActiveX, but it may be out of date, easily broken by new releases and its legality is murky.
• Install GhostScript on the server and request rendered thumbnails of any page from it.
  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.
  I use it for an internal software and it's working pretty well.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Here I render the jpeg thumbnails of the first page of the pdf document when a file is uploaded. When the user clicks he can download the document (or open them direcly in the browser) to read and print them.

Update: to create the thumbnails I used a .net component called PDFView4NET from O2Solutions