.net PDF Viewer control

Question

We are looking for a PDF Viewer control for WPF or WinForms application.

We have hit some road blocks with our current implementation which basically uses WindowsFormsHost to embed the Adobe Reader activeX control inside a WPF UserControl.

Using the above implementation we cannot do the following:

• Consistently show rotate buttons
• Save the file (We can save a copy, but not re-save) so we can keep the rotation that the user just performed.

I've scoured the internet for a .net control that has no external dependencies and found this component created by wpcubed and I've played with it and it seems to meet our needs. My question is are there some other alternatives?

If there are some LGPL-like licensed open source, we could consider it, but most likely we want to go with a 3rd party component preferably with a royalty-free distribution. But I'm just looking for some options that I haven't found yet.

Answer 1

Here is a great article detailing some contenders.

• Gnostice (www.gnostice.com)
• Atalasoft (www.atalasoft.com)
• DynamicPDF (www.dynamicpdf.com)
• Aspose (www.aspose.com)
• ActivePDF (www.activepdf.com)
• Deaja (www.daeja.com)
• Snowbound Software (snowbound.com)
• Bluebeam Q (www.bluebeam.com)
• PDFTron (www.pdftron.com)
• GDPicture (www.gdpicture.com)
• SyncFusion (www.syncfusion.com)
• O2 Solutions (www.o2sol.com)

Answer 2

PDFView4NET lets you display PDF files in WinForms and WPF applications. It includes support for rotating pages and saving the PDF file. PDFView4NET comes with royalty free distribution.

Disclaimer: I work for the company that develops PDFView4NET.

Answer 3

Some other components

Component One http://www.componentsource.com/news/2010/11/18/componentone-studio-wpf.html) http://www.componentsource.com/products/expertpdf-pdf-viewer/summary.html

DevXpress http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WPF/Printing/

Try the answer to this question (it has an interesting blog link - which I have added below) Please suggest a PDF viewer for WPF

Article may be of use http://hugeonion.com/2009/04/06/displaying-a-pdf-file-within-a-wpf-application/