Using LEADTOOLS Document Viewer

The Document Viewer uses LEADTOOLS Raster and Documents support, Caching, SVG, OCR, Annotations and Image Viewer technologies to support creating applications that can view, edit, and modify any type of document on the desktop or web with a minimal amount of code.

Features

Creating the Document Viewer

DocumentViewer is the main class used by the document viewer. It is not a control itself: instead, it uses parent containers provided by the user to create the necessary UI controls. These containers are native controls in the calling platform - for example, native Controls in Windows Forms and DIV elements in HTML/JavaScript. This allows the application to:

The following figure shows an application that uses the document viewer:

documentviewerparts.png

The DocumentViewer has the following parts:

  1. View: The part where the main content of the document is viewed. This part is not optional.

  2. Thumbnails: The part where the thumbnails of the pages are viewed. This part is optional.

  3. Bookmarks: The part where the bookmarks and table of content of the document is added. This part is optional.

  4. Annotations: The part where the annotations toolbar and objects list is added. This part is optional.

  5. Application User Interface: The rest consists of the UI elements of the user application and are not part of the document viewer. These are typically standard menu and toolbar items tied to document viewer commands.

To create a new DocumentViewer in your application:

  1. Create a new instance of DocumentViewerCreateOptions and initialize the following members:

    • ViewContainer: (Optional): Set it to an existing control in your application. This is where the main view is created (part 1). The document viewer will create an instance of ImageViewer and add it here.

    • ThumbnailsContainer (Optional): Set it to an existing control in your application. This is where the thumbnails is created (part 2). The document viewer will create an instance of ImageViewer and add it here.

    • BookmarksContainer (Optional): Set it to an existing control in your application. This is where the bookmarks and table of content is created (part 3). The document viewer will create a tree control and add it here.

    • UseAnnotations (Optional): Set it to true or false to use annotations in the document viewer. The annotations toolbar and automation objects are created later.

  2. Call the DocumentViewerFactory.CreateDocumentViewer method, passing the create options from the previous step.

After the DocumentViewer is created, you can start loading Documents into the control and call the various properties and methods to invoke operations in the viewer.

Loading Documents

The DocumentViewer can view any LEADTOOLS LEADDocument object. For information on how to load any type of document using this class, refer to Loading Using LEADTOOLS Document Library.

After obtaining a LEADDocument object, set it in the document viewer using the SetDocument method. The viewer will load the document and populate the view with raster or SVG representations of the pages. If thumbnails, bookmarks or annotations are used, they will be populated by the document viewer as well at this stage.

If the LEADDocument being set in the viewer is not read-only, then the viewer will get notified when the Pages collection changes as a result of the user adding or removing pages from the document; and updates the view, thumbnail, annotations, text, and bookmarks parts accordingly. If multiple pages (from multiple documents even), are to be added or removed from the viewer, it is best to surround the code with DocumentViewer.BeginUpdate and DocumentViewer.EndUpdate, to minimize flickering while the viewer updates its parts.

Example Code

The following are examples of the minimum code needed to create a document viewer and load a document file into it.

Desktop Application

For the Windows Forms platform, create a new Windows Forms application and then add the following to Form1: 

protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) 
{ 
   // Create the UI of the application. Two panels, one 
   // for the thumbnails (on the left) and one for the view (fill the form) 
   var viewPanel = new Panel { Dock = DockStyle.Fill }; 
   this.Controls.Add(viewPanel); 
   var thumbnailsPanel = new Panel { Dock = DockStyle.Left }; 
   this.Controls.Add(thumbnailsPanel); 
             
   // Create the document viewer using the panels we created 
   var createOptions = new DocumentViewerCreateOptions { ViewContainer = viewPanel, ThumbnailsContainer = thumbnailsPanel }; 
   var documentViewer = DocumentViewerFactory.CreateDocumentViewer(createOptions); 
             
   // Set some options, such as Pan/Zoom interactive mode 
   documentViewer.Commands.Run(DocumentViewerCommands.InteractivePanZoom); 
   // And view the documents as SVG if available - no rasterization 
   documentViewer.View.PreferredItemType = DocumentViewerItemType.Svg; 
             
   // Load a PDF document 
   var document = DocumentFactory.LoadFromFile( 
      @"C:\LEADTOOLS21\Resources\Images\Leadtools.pdf", 
      new LoadDocumentOptions { UseCache = false }); 
   // Set in the viewer 
   documentViewer.SetDocument(document); 
             
   base.OnLoad(e); 
}

Run the demo, and the viewer is created and is fully functional. After the PDF document is loaded, pan and zoom the view and scroll through the pages. Clicking any of the thumbnails will go to the corresponding page. Notice that SVG rendering is used, and when you use CTRL-Left and drag the mouse to zoom in, the pages are not rasterized: the text stays sharp.

documentviewersampledeskstop.png

Web Application

For the HTML5/JavaScript platform, create a new HTML file with the following elements in body: 

<!--View--> 
<div id="view"></div> 
 
<!-- Thumbnails --> 
<div id="thumbnails"></div>

Add the following JavaScript code: 

window.onload = function () { 
   // Create the document viewer using the DIV elements 
   var createOptions = new lt.Documents.UI.DocumentViewerCreateOptions(); 
   createOptions.viewContainer = document.getElementById("view"); 
   createOptions.thumbnailsContainer = document.getElementById("thumbnails"); 
   var documentViewer = lt.Documents.UI.DocumentViewerFactory.createDocumentViewer(createOptions); 
             
   // Set some options, such as Pan/Zoom interactive mode 
   documentViewer.commands.run(lt.Documents.UI.DocumentViewerCommands.interactivePanZoom); 
   // And view the documents as SVG if available - no rasterization 
   documentViewer.view.preferredItemType = lt.Documents.UI.DocumentViewerItemType.svg; 
             
   // Load a PDF document 
   var loadDocumentCommand = lt.Documents.LoadDocumentCommand.create("https://demo.leadtools.com/images/pdf/leadtools.pdf"); 
   var prom = loadDocumentCommand.run().done(function (document) { 
      // Ready, set in the viewer 
      documentViewer.setDocument(document); 
   }); 
};

Run the demo in any browser and the viewer is created and is fully functional like its Desktop counterpart. The PDF is loaded and rendered using SVG inside the web browser using native JavaScript code. Both mouse and touch are supported.

documentviewersampleweb.png
Help Version 21.0.2021.11.1
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LEADTOOLS Imaging, Medical, and Document
Introduction
Getting Started
LEADTOOLS Software License Agreement
LEADTOOLS NuGet Packages Dependency Tree
.NET Files to be Included with your Application
Java - Files to be Included with your Java Application
Files to be Included - Feature-Specific Assemblies
Imaging Features
Recognition Features
Document Features
Medical Features
Tutorials
Support
Version History
Assemblies
Appendix
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© 1991-2021 LEAD Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.