Archive for the ‘PDF Library’ category

We have released Docotic.Pdf 4.3.

Starting from this release the library ships in two versions. One version is for NET 4 and later frameworks and the other one for .NET 2 and later frameworks. So, now you can benefit from the version built for .NET 4 while you are still able to use the library in projects targeting older .NET frameworks.

Docotic.Pdf 4.3 brings support for Type 3 fonts. This version also contains number of other improvements related to fonts.

The library now can stroke and fill paths with patterns. This is a relatively rare feature of PDF format but it really shows when you try to draw document with patterns and there is no support for drawing them.

The new version adds support for PDF functions, separation color spaces and spot colors. We also fixed some issues in color processing.

We also improved extraction of text and images. These are some of the areas we improve in almost every version of the library. This is release is not an exception.

There are other improvements and bug fixes. Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 4.3 in the Version History document.

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

 

In the first part, we have completed the basic PDF printing application. The “Hello World” sample is good as a proof of concept, but it is too simple. You will probably want to have following features in a real application:

1. Print existing PDF documents.
2. Print multiple pages.
3. Setup paper size and orientation.
4. Preview print output.
5. Reuse the printing code.

I will incrementally modify the demo application in order to show how to support all of these features.

Read more

I am pleased to announce that Docotic.Pdf is now available on NuGet.

Some of our customers advised us to publish the library there and we followed the advice.

To install Docotic.Pdf library, run the following command in the Package Manager Console</p>

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PM> Install-Package BitMiracle.Docotic.Pdf
And we did one more thing: we added Beta channel for the library. Feel free to use it if you want to get newest features and latest bug fixes.

The version in Beta channel is tested for regressions and is safe to be used in production environment. Be prepared for some incomplete features or possible API changes in beta version, though.

To install Docotic.Pdf library from Beta channel, run the following command in the Package Manager Console

PM> Install-Package BitMiracle.Docotic.Pdf.Beta
Please feel free to suggest features using e-mail or via the support form. And don’t hesitate to write us your questions or ask for help.

.NET Framework provides good support for printing in Windows Forms, WPF and Windows Store applications. You can easily show print preview dialog, customize print settings and, actually, print documents. You just need to prepare your document for printing – convert the document to a sequence of drawing commands or convert the document to the one of printer-friendly formats like XPS. It might be painful if format of your document is a complex one.

PDF is an example of such a complex document format. It is one of the most popular file formats for publishing documents, but .NET does not support printing of PDF documents out of the box.

Docotic.Pdf library adds support for printing PDF documents in .NET applications. I will show how to build a Windows Forms application that prints PDF documents. The application will display print preview dialog before printing, will have support for custom print settings and, of course, will print PDF documents to the selected printer.

Read more

New version of Docotic.Pdf library is out.

Docotic.Pdf 4.2 is mostly a “bug fixes and improvements” release. Nevertheless, it brings some new features, too.

The new version adds ability to embed previously non-embedded fonts and vice versa. Have a look at PdfFont.Embed() and PdfFont.Unembed() methods.

For those who are willing to produce smallest PDFs possible there is new ability to remove structure information from documents. We added PdfDocument.RemoveStructureInformation() method and PdfSaveOptions.RemoveUnusedObjects property for you.

Form filling become more capable in this version. Library can rotate controls. You can specify font size equal to zero for text and combo boxes (to cause their font size to be auto adjusted). In addition, the new version can import appearance streams while importing FDF files.

The new version does better job in recompressing and scaling of images. Version 4.2 also draws documents better. Especially in high resolutions.

There are other improvements and a whole lot of bug fixes. Too much to talk about them here. Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 4.2 in the Version History document. There are information about one breaking change related to fonts.

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

We have released new version of Docotic.Pdf library.

Docotic.Pdf 4.1 fixes some bugs related to opening of existing documents (including encrypted ones). The new version also brings number of improvements in drawing of PDF documents as well as in extraction of images.

This version adds new PdfDrawOptions.TileWidth and PdfDrawOptions.TileHeight properties which can be used to control how much memory is used while drawing.

Drawing of PDF documents using tiles can be slower than regular drawing but it allows you to draw very big documents in high resolution without consuming obscene amounts of memory. Were are expecting some speed optimizations in tiled drawing in upcoming releases of the library.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 4.1 in the Version History document.

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

I am very happy to announce that we’ve released Docotic.Pdf 4 on our site.

Seven months of active development were not in vain: the new major release brings some great improvements.

Docotic.Pdf 4 comes with new, much improved text rendering engine. With the new engine text gets drawn at the right positions with the right font. The new version of the library produces much more accurate outputs then the previous version did. Let me assure you: you will see the difference.

Text rendering and text extraction are often go hand in hand. With Docotic.Pdf that’s not different. New version of the library extracts text more precisely and can provide you more information about text in a PDF document. You can know the font, the pen and brush color and the rendering mode used to draw any chunk of text. There are new properties in the PdfTextData class for that.

The new version adds support for JPEG 2000 images. The library can add, extract and draw them. Other imaging related areas also received some of our attention. Some bugs related to processing of JPEGs were fixed. Extraction of images (including masked ones and those in the CMYK color space) was improved.

As with every release of the library, we also fixed processing of some PDFs which not quite meet the standard and documents with unusual internal structure.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 4 in the Version History document.

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

I am happy to announce that Docotic.Pdf 3.7 is finally released.

Like in the previous release of the library, we optimized the code of Docotic.Pdf and now library opens documents even faster than before. The new release also adds some new features, part of which were suggested by our customers. And there are some bug fixes in the new version, too.

We added ability to embed and extract file attachments and file annotations. Please have a look at the new group of samples called Attachments.

The library improved to better preserve existing structures in PDF files. It means that Docotic.Pdf will try to keep an internal structure of a file as is unless it was changed by the user.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 3.7 in Version History document

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hi!

We have released new version of the Docotic.Pdf library. Most of the changes in this version are likely to benefit every customer.

We greatly optimized the code of the library and now Docotic.Pdf takes two times less time and in many cases two times less memory to complete a task. We published separate post about results of our optimizations. You can read it here.

We added ability to check if PDF document is a PDF/A compliant one. Please have a look at Check if PDF document is a PDF/A compliant one sample.

We also added new compression option. It’s called PdfSaveOptions.OptimizeIndirectObjects property. This option is turned on by default and you can turn it off if you want files to be saved faster.

Another improvement is ability to specify resolution for images produced while drawing pages.

We also improved processing of TIFF images and extraction of text and images from PDF documents.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 3.6 in Version History document

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

Our customers told us that Docotic.Pdf is not always behaves modestly. The library tends to consume large amounts of memory for large files and often spends much time doing some operations.

We’ve done a lot to make new version of Docotic.Pdf faster and less memory-consuming. Now I want to share some statistics about results of our efforts.

To see what we achieved, we took five PDF files and ran some tests on them. Here is the description of the files we took:

File name	Page count	File size	Contents
emerging.pdf	6	94 KB	only text
rdsolr1907.pdf	111	2.03 MB	mostly text, some images, linearized
official_journal_10022006.pdf	705	20 MB	mostly text, some images, linearized
LargePDFFile.pdf	4800	34 MB	mostly text, some images, linearized
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	765	146 MB	mostly scanned images

For a start, we measured how much time and how many memory required to just open a file. The table below contains relative results of our measurements:

Open only
File name	Time, %	Memory consumption, %
emerging.pdf	-13	-51
rdsolr1907.pdf	-44	-55
official_journal_10022006.pdf	-87	-95
LargePDFFile.pdf	-91	-83
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	-31	-53

It’s nice to see that opening of PDF files is now about 2 times faster and takes about 3 times less memory (on average). And for larger files improvements are even more obvious.

But how the library behaves in more complex scenarios?

Next, we took the same files and measured time and memory required to open PDF and extract formatted text from all of its pages. Below are the results:

Open and extract all text with formatting
File name	Time, %	Memory consumption, %
emerging.pdf	-10	-33
rdsolr1907.pdf	-70	-26
official_journal_10022006.pdf	-59	-39
LargePDFFile.pdf	-66	-39
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	-54	-31

And again the whole process took about two times less time (on average). Memory gains are less impressive this time but still, about 30% less memory (on average) is not bad at all.

The last one test is simple but represents a real-life scenario. We measured time and memory required to open PDF, then encrypt it with AES 128bit and then save. Below are the results:

Open, encrypt with AES 128bit and save
File name	Time, %	Memory consumption, %
emerging.pdf	-17	-69
rdsolr1907.pdf	-42	-9
official_journal_10022006.pdf	-84	-70
LargePDFFile.pdf	-69	-41
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	-19	-69

In this case the whole process took about 2 times less time and memory (on average).

We think that such improvements won’t go unnoticed by our customers. And we want to say that we have some thoughts about how to further improve the library. So, we continue to profile and improve Docotic.Pdf.

Please feel free to share your thoughts about recent improvements.