Doubts in PDFTron products

[Pawan Kumar]

Hi Team,

I have used your evaluation version of various product for local development and have some doubts.

I was going through the below link.

https://www.pdftron.com/webviewer/index.html

As per the link it is mentioned that webviewer comes in 2 flavors, (1) Universal (2) PDF. 

As per my experience/knowledge with the product till now is that if we will download the webviewer then we will get these both features in webviewer i.e. (1) Universal (2) PDF or we have to download it separately.

And PDF flavor is nothing buth PDFNetJS which is mentioned here. 

https://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/pdfnetjs/index.html

So if I only purchase the webviewer then I can use universal and pdf (it is PDFNetJs) flavor of webviewer. 

(1)Universal webviewer flavor : - To use universal flavor I need to purchase PDFNet Sdk separately too because to use universal webviewer I need to pass .xod file format in webviwer api which I can covert with the help of PDFNet sdk on server side. This is mainly used if I have file with various extensions like .doc., .pdf, .xls etc.

(2) PDF flavor: It is known as PDFNetJs which is mentioned here https://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/pdfnetjs/index.html. To use this I need to pass .pdf file in webviewer api. 

And if I need to render only PDF files in my application then I don't need to purchase PDFNet SDK because this flavor has in build feature to render PDF files.

Please correct me if I am wrong somewhere.

Regards,

Pawan

[Matt Parizeau]

Hi Pawan,

You're correct, when you download WebViewer it includes support for both XOD and PDF viewing, you don't have to download it separately. If you pass a PDF file to WebViewer it will automatically load the extra JavaScript that is necessary for viewing PDF files. If you're only using XOD then you could delete the lib/html5/pdf folder if you wanted to, though it will not be loaded if you're only viewing XOD files.

However for licensing things are different depending on what type of files you want to view.

1) If you want to use WebViewer for viewing XOD files then you'll need to purchase a license for either PDFNet SDK, PWS or DocPub to be able to convert to XOD. See this tutorial for more information http://pdftron.com/webviewer/demo/tutorials/getting-started-converting.html.

2) The license for PDFNetJS is different from any of the ones for converting XOD files. You would need a license specific for PDFNetJS and you would receive a license key that you need to pass to the WebViewer constructor. This tutorial shows where to pass your license key http://pdftron.com/webviewer/demo/tutorials/getting-started.html.

Let me know if you need any further clarifications.

Matt Parizeau

Software Developer

PDFTron Systems Inc.

[Pawan Kumar]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the reply. Now I have few more queries. he 

Suppose I want to work with PDFNetJs and take license of full version of PDFNetJS so in that case do I need to use lib folder of PDFNetJs setup for file preview which is available here (http://pdftron.com/downloads/PDFNetJS.zip)

or I need to use lib folder of web viewer which can be downloaded from here (https://www.pdftron.com/downloads/WebViewer.zip).

I have downloaded both and integrated in my custom application however the ui of both is same, so I am not getting the difference between these 2 products as you have already told that web viewer include upport for both pdf and xod both so why are you providing 2 separate product (1)PDFNetJs & (2)Webviewer? If webviewer is capable of showing pdf file as well then what is the main purpose of PDFNetJS?

Please make it clear in detail.

Thanks,

Pawan

[Matt Parizeau]

Hi Pawan,

You can refer to page 4 of the WebViewer Developer Guide (https://www.pdftron.com/webviewer/demo/doc/WebViewer_Developer_Guide.html) which explains the different WebViewer backends but I'll summarize and go into a bit more detail about how this works.

You can think of WebViewer as the HTML5 viewer (DocumentViewer, Document, AnnotationManager, etc) that allows you to view documents. WebViewer supports two backends (XOD and PDF) which allows the same WebViewer UI to display either XOD or PDF documents.

The PDF backend (PDFNetJS) comes in two packages (Lean and Full) depending on how you want to use it. The lean version is actually the same as what you would download from https://www.pdftron.com/downloads/WebViewer.zip. It includes both XOD and PDF viewing. It's mainly to help customers coming from the PDFNet section of the website find it as they may be interested in PDF viewing and modifications but not aware it could be done in the browser.

The full version includes basically the entire power of PDFNet (view, annotate, split/merge, fill-forms, redact, optimize, stamp, generate, convert, encrypt, etc) though it can also be used for simple document viewing like the lean version. Here is a tutorial for getting started with the full version http://pdftron.com/webviewer/pdfnetjs/tutorials/PDFNet/starting-out.html.

The reason there are separate lean and full versions provided is because the file size of the full version is significantly larger. If you only want to view PDF documents and won't take advantage of the other PDFNet functions then you would just want to use the lean version for a faster load time and less memory usage.

So in conclusion the WebViewer download is the same as the PDFNetJS Lean download, they're just different ways to access it on the PDFTron website. PDFNetJS Full includes the full power of PDFNet but for the browser, and because of its larger size it should only be used if you'll be taking advantage of those APIs.

I hope this helps clear things up!

Matt Parizeau

Software Developer

PDFTron Systems Inc.