[RESOLVED] Loading PDF files into my project as images...

I know that in the "Insertable Objects" tab on the Components window, that there is "Adobe Acrobat Document," but that isn't really what I'm looking for. I'm not sure what the "Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Browser Control Type Library 1.0" (created an error when I tried to use it) is in the "Controls" tab.

Here is the functionality that I need:

- read how many pages are in a PDF file
- import each page as a background into a picturebox



I saw this on StackOverflow regarding converting PDF's to TIFF's, so I'm not sure if this would be the best way to go? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...rt-pdf-to-tiff

I also saw this: http://www.quickpdflibrary.com/faq/c...age-to-pdf.php

This one looked promising, but it appears to be for .NET: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/For...-c1d98a90a2a2/



I'll be working on this, but anything to point me in the right direction is greatly appreciated.

How do you feel about buying a control?

Google viscomsoft imageviewer cp pro. Not free but fairly cheap.

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Originally Posted by Darkbob

How do you feel about buying a control?

Google viscomsoft imageviewer cp pro. Not free but fairly cheap.

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Any idea how fast it can convert a 100-page PDF into 3k x 3k resolution BMP/JPG/PNG files? Hoping to find something that can do this in under 30 seconds.

Any idea how it compares to this? http://www.amyuni.com/en/developer/pdfcreatoractivex/

I have a license for QuickPDF, and it works quite well for me, but I haven't tried such large documents with such large images in a timed test. Do you have a sample PDF I could try and I'll let you know how fast it is?

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Originally Posted by jpbro

I have a license for QuickPDF, and it works quite well for me, but I haven't tried such large documents with such large images in a timed test. Do you have a sample PDF I could try and I'll let you know how fast it is?

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Sure. I'll PM you my email address.

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Originally Posted by jpbro

I have a license for QuickPDF, and it works quite well for me, but I haven't tried such large documents with such large images in a timed test. Do you have a sample PDF I could try and I'll let you know how fast it is?

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Thanks for all the help! From the QuickPDF forums, I learned that the ActiveX version requires each end user to go through a registration process, so it looks like the source code that you supplied, which uses the DLL version, may very well be what I end up using. I'm going to take Amyuni's PDF Creator for a spin as well, since they boast that their software is faster than ImageMagick and CutePDF at writing PDFs (no benchmarks for PDF->Tiff, etc. conversion, I'm afraid.) It's more expensive, however, so unless it's significantly faster, I'll be going with QuickPDF.

Also, for future reference, in converting 36"x24" PDFs at 150 DPI, it took an average of 2.566 seconds to convert to BMP (but obviously the output files were ridiculously large, so it's not a wise choice), 4.131 seconds to convert to JPEG (not sure compression quality settings it used -- whatever the defaults are; average file size of roughly 750KB), 4.596 seconds for PNG (average file size of roughly 1MB), and 2.809 seconds for TIFF (average file size of roughly 3MB)... so it seems like TIFF is the way to go if speed is a concern. Memory usage would do cycles between 300MB and 580MB while processing most of the pages, but near the end it started spiking to 850MB -- not sure why, though! Once it was done converting the entire PDF, it went back down to 12MB private set and 24MB working set. It's a bit of a memory hog, but I guess that's what happens when you're dealing with 5400 x 3600 images. Cleans up nicely, though.