Atalasoft Web Document Viewer control

The WebDocumentViewer (aka WDV) and WebDocumentThumbnailer (aka WDT) are JavaScript based image viewing controls that could be easily created by adding few snippets of HTML and JavaScript on your web page and a separate bare-bones requests handler on the server side.

Introduction

There currently is a gap of functionality on the internet in that browsers currently only display "web native" image formats (PNG, JPEG, GIF, and SVG). Popular multipage document formats like PDF, TIFF and Office formats (like Excel and Word), all cannot be displayed natively on a web page. Atalasoft web controls solves this problem and provide JavaScript APIs to build viewer apps that:

• Work on every HTML5 browser (including mobile browsers).
• Display different types of images. PDF, TIFF, PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PCX, PSD, PCD, RAW, WMF/EMF, TGA, JBIG2, Jpeg2000, DICOM, DWG, Xps, etc.
• Modify document structure and save modified documents.
• Enable annotations, thumbnails, and mobile support for a document.
• Display and fill PDF forms.
• Support text selection basing on PDF text layer or OCR data.
• Effectively work with big documents - make it possible to stream individual pages on demand without downloading the entire document first.
• Can be embedded into an existing web page or application.

Installation

Nuget

PM> Install-Package Atalasoft.Web.Document.Viewer

NPM

npm install web-document-viewer

Backend Overview

Atalasoft HTML5 imaging controls are support following server environments

• ASP.NET

  Server side functionality is exposed using separate HttpHandler. See ASP.NET demo application tutorial for details.

• ASP.NET Core on full .net platform

  Server side functionality is exposed using WebDocumentViewerMiddleware that is registered to handle WDV requests. See ASP.NET Core demo application tutorial for details.

Frontend Overview

WebDocumentViewer and WebDocumentThumbnailer require Jquery and Jquery UI libraries. If annotations support is enabled, Raphael.js library is also required. If text support is enabled, then Raphael.js and ClipboardJS are both required.

Jquery should be included into web page by the application. If some of the other dependent libraries don't exist in the web page scope, controls are trying to automatically load them (using file names from dotImage web resources bundle shipped by installer). When controls are delivered by NuGet it's required to manually deploy them on the page (since file names could differ for different versions).

Sample application

You can find a demo application showing basic usage of Web Document Viewer component of DotImage product. Live version of the demo is hosted on Azure: http://atalasoft-viewer-demo.azurewebsites.net/

Licensing

To run the projects locally, you need to have a DotImage license. There are various ways to acquire the license:

• Use DotImage Activation Wizard Visual Studio extension
• Download a complete DotImage installation package from the Atalasoft web site. You will be prompted to activate the product during installation

This source code is property of Atalasoft, Inc. (http://www.atalasoft.com/)
Permission for usage and modification of this code is only permitted with the purchase of a source code license.

Related Articles

• Web Document Viewer documentation
• Introducing NuGet Packages
• Introducing Activation Wizard Extension
• NuGet Tutorial I - Web Document Viewer