Preview PDF in C#

Question

I'm looking for .NET GUI component (different than PDFsharp) allowing preview PDF 1-page document.
Basically I need something similar to PictureBox where I can load bitmaps and show it.

It would be great if that component allows zooming and moving picture inside.
Freeware solutions preferred :)

Answer 1

Another option is to use the WebBrowser control in your GUI. It's going to use the browser to render the PDF, but I'd do that route rather than mess around with the Adobe Reader ActiveX component.

If you don't want any type of PDF reader available on the client, you could also convert it to a graphic file through GhostScript and display it as a bitmap.

Answer 2

you can use activex component that comes with Acrobat Reader.

How to render pdfs using C#

Answer 3

Question is rather old, but proposed solutions have significant drawbacks:

• WebBrowser control relies on the IE and that it can display PDF documents (this is true only if Adobe Reader is installed)
• GhostScript is licensed under AGPL and it requires rather expensive license for usage in closed source/commercial projects.

Fortunately free alternative exists: poppler tools (based on xpdf codebase) which are licensed under GPL and may be used as console utility. From .NET code it may be executed with System.Diagnostics.Process.

To simplify poppler tools usage we've developed NReco.PdfRenderer .NET wrapper that embeds poppler windows binaries (they're extracted on first use) and provides simple API for rendering PDF pages to image:

var pdfToImg = new NReco.PdfRenderer.PdfToImageConverter();
Image firstPageImg = pdfToImg.GenerateImage( "test.pdf", 1);

Component is not free, but its pricing is very reasonable.