Adding online PDF Viewing and collaboration in a web-based solution.
Support
Our product allows customers to review assets, documents and videos using web-based team collaboration and review markup functionality. We are interested in using PDFTron SDKs as part of our offering.
We have a need for clients to be able to review multi-page and high-definition PDF documents online and would like to consider the PDFTron functionality for this. We understand that either the PDF2SVG or the PDFNET SDK could be useful - we need to rapidly build a prototype to show clients and will be using your trail versions . Can you provide us with the information to compare the PDF2SVG and PDFNET SDK products please.
I understand also that the on-line free download is a 60d licence, can you confirm this please and what limits there are in using the free download versions of the products in our demos.
It is also important for us that clients can expect a 100% translation of their PDF document within the SVG that is displayed in our system; if there are any areas of non-conformance can you inform us please so that we can be aware of these areas and can set expectations.
A:
PDFTron offers couple of possibly relevant solutions:
a) PDF to SVG conversion
b) PDFNet WebViewer
Both of these are available as extensions to PDFNet platform SDK (SVG converter as part of Convert Add-on and WebViewer as part of PDFNet WebViewer Add-on) as well as stand-alone CLI utilities (http://www.pdftron.com/pdf2svg/downloads.html,http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/webviewer/download.html).
The limitation of a demo version is that converted files are watermarked and that the evaluation is limited to around 60 days of active use.
Technically the difference between the two options boils down to which technology you would like to adopt in your solution: i.e. SVG vs HTML5/Flash/Silverlight.
+++
In a) you would be adopting SVG as a main format in your app. Unfortunately SVG support is still quite weak and inconsistent. For more information, please see: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/pdfnet-sdk/LvbvCTS5HUM/discussion
PDFTron PDF to SVG converter implement various hacks to go around browser specific limitations, but this does not always work and could result in sub-optimal performance. On mobile platforms (iOS / Android) - SVG has a bleak future due to memory and speed issues required for DOM processing.
With respect to conversion, PDF to SVG converter doesn't handle features that are not supported in SVG (e.g. blend modes specific to PDF, transparency groups, certain shading types, etc.). Some of this could be alleviated with selective rasterization of PDF content.
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To provide better document viewing experience on the Web, PDFTron developed PDFNet WebViewer (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/webviewer) which uses a web optimized version of Open XPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification- which we call XOD) as the underlying format.
PDFNet WebViewer takes as input a XOD data stream which can be generated using PDFNet SDK, PDFNet Cloud API, or DocPub CLI. PDF format is only one of formats supported by PDFNet, Cloud API, or DocPub CLI.
As a starting point, to get a feel for the technology, please see the online demo:
http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/webviewer/demo.html
You can also convert your own files via bookstore sample app:
http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/cloud/samples.html
PDFNet WebViewer is using HTML5 Canvas element to render PDF and can produce consistent output across different browsers and platforms (including mobile devices - e.g. iPad/iPhone, Android, etc).
Unlike SVG, WebViewer does not suffer from memory, speed limitation, and includes many document wide functions (e.g. text selection, search, paging, outlines, links/annotations, incremental download, etc.) that would be very difficult and time consuming to implement with plain SVG. Compared to current state of SVG support, PDFNet WebViewer can also guarantee a pixel-perfect output.
WebViewer can also use alternate technologies (such as Flash and Silverlight) as a fallback (or as a preferred technology) when there is no Canvas support (e.g. on older browsers).
The WebViewer API also allows for complete viewer customization (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/webviewer/demo/html5/doc/index.html) and extensions. The SDK (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/webviewer/download.html) comes with source code for ReaderControl, and the low-level APIs could be used to implement new controls from scratch.
Support
Our product allows customers to review assets, documents and videos using web-based team collaboration and review markup functionality. We are interested in using PDFTron SDKs as part of our offering.
We have a need for clients to be able to review multi-page and high-definition PDF documents online and would like to consider the PDFTron functionality for this. We understand that either the PDF2SVG or the PDFNET SDK could be useful - we need to rapidly build a prototype to show clients and will be using your trail versions . Can you provide us with the information to compare the PDF2SVG and PDFNET SDK products please.
I understand also that the on-line free download is a 60d licence, can you confirm this please and what limits there are in using the free download versions of the products in our demos.
It is also important for us that clients can expect a 100% translation of their PDF document within the SVG that is displayed in our system; if there are any areas of non-conformance can you inform us please so that we can be aware of these areas and can set expectations.
A:
PDFTron offers couple of possibly relevant solutions:
a) PDF to SVG conversion
b) PDFNet WebViewer
Both of these are available as extensions to PDFNet platform SDK (SVG converter as part of Convert Add-on and WebViewer as part of PDFNet WebViewer Add-on) as well as stand-alone CLI utilities (http://www.pdftron.com/pdf2svg/downloads.html, http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/webviewer/download.html).
The limitation of a demo version is that converted files are watermarked and that the evaluation is limited to around 60 days of active use.
Technically the difference between the two options boils down to which technology you would like to adopt in your solution: i.e. SVG vs HTML5/Flash/Silverlight.
+++
In a) you would be adopting SVG as a main format in your app. Unfortunately SVG support is still quite weak and inconsistent. For more information, please see: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/pdfnet-sdk/LvbvCTS5HUM/discussion
PDFTron PDF to SVG converter implement various hacks to go around browser specific limitations, but this does not always work and could result in sub-optimal performance. On mobile platforms (iOS / Android) - SVG has a bleak future due to memory and speed issues required for DOM processing.
With respect to conversion, PDF to SVG converter doesn't handle features that are not supported in SVG (e.g. blend modes specific to PDF, transparency groups, certain shading types, etc.). Some of this could be alleviated with selective rasterization of PDF content.
+++
To provide better document viewing experience on the Web, PDFTron developed PDFNet WebViewer (http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/webviewer) which uses a web optimized version of Open XPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification - which we call XOD) as the underlying format.