Reading/Writing PDF Files in Visual C# Windows Forms

Question

For a client, I need to be able to read and write PDF files. There are two downsides to this:

1. I don\'t know how.
2. I can\'t use any third-party copmonen

Answer 1

Agree with the answers above. Implementing a PDF engine isn't a trivial task. If you need to do the full one reading and modifying PDF, then use third party library like suggested.

I have worked with PDF document creation, management and etc for several years. Often I found that the requirement to handle PDF can be very basic and achieved quite easily but misunderstood. I will just list some options here to consider if one of your requirement fall in to this category:

• For displaying PDF within you program, you can drop a browser control and setting the Navigate URL to the pdf document will automatically display the inline PDF just like in the IE browser.
• If you need to produce from an existing document, you can simply use print driver like doPDF, PDFCreator and etc and automate the process of printing to the driver
• If you are creating the document from Word, you can automated Word2007 and use the SaveAsPDF interface offered
• If you need to transform it to different format, depending on the target format Ghostscript commands are worth checking out too.