What is the best way to display a PDF file in Delphi 2009 [closed]

Question

What component should I use to display a PDF file in a Delphi 2009 application?

EDIT:

I have been using PDF Viewer by Synactis - a very nice free PDF Viewer But it has no Delphi 2009 support.

So I need to designing it out of the product

Answer 1

I have a feeling that more and more users prefere alternatives to acrobat reader, so forcing them to install acrobat to use your progam is a bad idea.

The ProPlus version of Gnistice PDFtoolkit let you display pdf files. And so does QuickPDFLibrary. I'm sure there are more of them.

Launching the file in the users prefered pdf viewer could be a second option for better controlling printing etc.

Answer 2

We embedded the Acrobat Reader in our Delphi application. Take a look at this article "How to embed Adobe Acrobat into your application". Once you have added the Acrobat Reader ActiveX component to your Form you can use following code:

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); 
begin
  // This example assumes that you have a TOpenDialog
  // and TPdf dropped onto your form
  OpenDialog1.Filter := 'PDF Files (*.pdf)|*.pdf';
  if OpenDialog1.Execute then
    Pdf1.src := OpenDialog1.FileName;
end;

There is native Delphi components out there but embedding the Acrobat Reader component served our needs.