TUTORIALS

Viewer Tutorial:
Integrating PDF contents in your applications

As easy as 1, 2, 3...

Introduction

As an application writer, you might feel the need to integrate PDF contents inside your applications. As we will see in this tutorial, jPDF Viewer is the tool you're looking for. It provides a rich API that allows you to easily integrate PDF document rendering inside your applications.

But before we dive into the details, let's anticipate a few of the most common questions and provide you with some answers:

1. jPDF Viewer is a 100% Java component that doesn't require any third party application.
   
   Indeed, the only software required is a Java Virtual Machine, which can be found nowadays on any computer system.
   The software itself is about 4Mb large, which is far from the 25Mb required for Acrobat; this makes it a perfect candidate for thin clients such as applets or WebStart.
   
   
2. jPDF Viewer is meant for thin/fat client applications written using Swing (alternatively SWT or AWT can be used).
   
   The component works on top of Java2D and uses the Swing API to present a component interface. If you are looking into integrating PDF content in a website, you might want to check jPDF Printer. It can render pdf pages to JPEG or GIF image formats.
   
   
3. jPDF Viewer integrates smoothly with the other jPDF modules (template, signer, creator, encryption, etc., ...)

jPDF Viewer is actually one of the only viewers with support for signatures, form fields, encryption and outlines. In fact, very few of our competitors can offer such a large scope of features. Our state-of-the-art pdf engine also knows how to correct erroneous documents and minimize memory resources, something which might not seem like much but which reveals all its benefits once you begin to render large documents.

 

Levels of integration

jPDF Viewer provides three levels of integration:

 

Name	Description
RendererPanel	This is the simplest widget element. The widget implicitly knows how to render pdf pages using a given matrix layout. In fact, a scrollbar will show if the pages cannot be fully displayed. The API provides methods to get and set the page as well as to access zoom, zoom mode, rotation, matrix display, etc., ...
ViewerPanel	This widget presents a set of toolbars, tabs, a status/control bar and a wizard panel. It also has support for full screen mode. Most of these elements can, of course, be hidden.
ViewerFrame	Finally, the ViewerFrame shows a full features application including a window menu - along with the features of all the previous widgets. As this class is a frame, its componentization is difficult and it should be used As-Is.

 

Where to go next?

 

At this point you should have a better understanding of jPDF Viewer, its features and how to integrate it.
Please use one of the following links to access the next tutorials.

RendererPanel tutorial
ViewerPanel tutorial