Solid Documents Developer Blog

7.3 of Solid Framework Released

2012-09-21T19:46:00.001-07:00

7.3 of Solid Framework Released

Solid OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been improved:
8 languages now supported (English, Dutch, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish).
Improved text recognitions. OCR allows you to apply a searchable text layer when scanning or easily add a text layer to an existing scanned PDF file.

Other v7.3 improvements include:

PDF to Word: heading/style detection, table of contents reconstruction, hierarchical list reconstruction
Complete rework of PDF to PowerPoint reconstruction including transitions, master slides and PowerPoint specific layout engine
Great improvements to PDF to HTML conversion to take advantage of table of contents reconstruction and style detection. Single page output with navigation frame or multiple linked HTML pages for navigation.
PagesModel and Thumbnail Controls to allow construction of PDF page manipulation applications complete with User Interface.

Trial developer licenses and SDK available from the Developer Portal at soliddocuments.com.

How to change the configuration in your project to 64 bits

2012-09-02T19:11:00.000-07:00

This example uses Visual Studio 2010.

1. Open your project in Visual Studio. From the Build menu select Configuration Manager...

2. From the Active solution configuration menu select Debug or Release depending on what are you want to set up.

Then from the Active solution platform menu select New...

3. Select x64 (the Create new project platforms is checked by default).

4. Change the Copy settings from option to Empty then click OK.

Code Samples and Video Tutorials

2012-08-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

Did you know we now have Solid Framework video tutorials available from our website?

You can find them here under our documentation page.

Email us at support@soliddocuments.com to request other code samples.

Adobe Licenses Solid Document Technology for Acrobat X

2010-11-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Adobe) has licensed Solid Framework SDK for Adobe® Acrobat® X. Adobe Acrobat X takes advantage of Solid Documents’ PDF to Word and Excel conversion capabilities, allowing Acrobat X users to easily reuse and repurpose PDF content.

Read the press release here.

Recent rave reviews for Solid Framework’s core conversion features in the new Adobe Acrobat X:

Ed Mendelson of PC Magazine:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370981,00.asp

Darryl K. Taft of eWeek:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Adobe-Acrobat-X-10-Reasons-to-Move-to-It-Now-179555/

Alan Stafford of PC World:
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/707770/review/acrobat_x_pro.html

PDF for Lawyers:
http://www.pdfforlawyers.com/2010/10/improved-export-to-word-in-acrobat-x.html
http://www.pdfforlawyers.com/2010/10/adobe-announces-acrobat-10-my-quick-review.html

Steven Kovach of Business Insider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/hands-on-with-adobe-acrobat-x-pro-2010-11

Using Solid Framework through ASP.NET and IIS 7.0

2010-09-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

We have posted a new article on Code Project that walks you through how to setup IIS 7.0 to be able to use Solid Framework through ASP.NET.

New 7.0 of Solid Framework Released

2010-07-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

Newest version enhances conversion and reconstruction features; Gives developers power to build applications for the creation, modification and conversion of PDF files within 64-bit native environment.

See full press release here.

Solid Framework updated with new Installer and ProgressTicker classes.

2009-12-05T17:32:00.000-08:00

We've released a new version of Solid Framework SDK 6.0.255.0. This build addresses a couple issues:

PdfPage.DrawBitmap always adds a watermark regardless of the license. It now properly disables the watermark if the license is a non free version.
When converting Pdf pages to image files, the first page is blank. The GDI+ module is now loaded before the page drawing starts.
Extraction of the support files is now faster because we are using memory streams instead of file streams.

This version also includes the new Configuration.Installer class, that we will talk about today in this blog post. With this class Solid Framework can be installed in one of three ways:

Self extraction to the current users local application data folder.
Self extraction to a folder handed to the Installer class.
Pre extraction.

The first method is the default method that the previous versions of Solid Framework has been using. When the application calls one of the Solid Framework methods, it will check to see if the support files have been extracted to the current users application data folder, and if it has not, it will extract it at this point.

The second method allows these support files to be extracted to any folder the developer wishes. Before any Solid Framework method is called, the developer can set the Configuration.Installer.NativePlatformDirectory string property to a full path, and that path will be used as the root folder for the support files. This is useful if you want to share the support folder between many users and don't want each user to have their own copy of the support files, or you wish to remove this known folder location during an uninstall.

The third method is to use the ExtractFramework tool to extract the support files from Solid Framework beforehand and install them to a folder you want in your application installer. You have to let the Framework know where these files are by setting the Configuration.Installer.NativePlatformDirectory string property in the application. This gives the developer total control during the install and uninstall.

Another feature of this release is the ProgressTicker event class. You can register for this event to show progress UI while Solid Framework is extracting the support files (if needed).

The default for ProgressTicker is 50 ticks for the extraction. This tick value can be set to any value you wish by setting the TicksPerEpisode property off the ProgressTicker to any integer value. This also enables feedback in console applications, which didn't work in previous versions of Solid Framework, that needed a Windows message pump to work.

The extraction tool link above uses this feature to show feedback of the extraction. Source code for the ExtractFramework tool is included, it shows you how ProgressTicker works. Both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 projects are included in the package.

New Solid Framework released

2009-11-19T16:58:00.000-08:00

We have released a new version (6.0.251) of Solid Framework SDK that now includes full support for image processing and optical text recognition to allow conversion of scanned PDF files to editable Word documents. Solid Framework takes advantage of the MODI API (part of Microsoft Office) to provide OCR capability.

When converting PDF to Office documents, you can specify when OCR is used by setting the TextRecoveryType:

To one of the following settings:

Always - All pages are rendered to images and processed as scanned pages.

Automatic - Pages that contain scanned text-like images are recognized automatically.

Default - Same as Automatic.

Never - No scanned page processing. Scanned pages converted as images.

Convert PDF pages to Image files

2009-09-04T14:35:00.000-07:00

Another comment question we get in email is if Solid Framework can convert PDF pages into image files. Solid Framework can be used to convert PDF pages into image files, and we use this feature to create page thumbnail images and the main page view for PDF Navigator. Here is a diagram of how this works:

You can download the sample project [zip file] to see this in action yourself. The project contains both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 solutions. Those without Microsoft Visual Studio can use Visual C# 2008 Express Edition for free to work with the sample project.

Earlier we talked about using a C# class library to allow you to use the scripting functionality of Solid PDF Tools Scan to PDF from the command line. We use this class again to parse out the command line arguments we need to convert the pages into image files:

  Arguments CommandLine = new Arguments(args);‍
  if (CommandLine["f"] == null)‍
  {
    ShowUsage();‍
    return -1;
  }‍
  else
    pdfFile = CommandLine["f"];‍

  if (CommandLine["p"] != null)‍
    password = CommandLine["p"];

‍  if (CommandLine["o"] == null)
  {‍
    ShowUsage();
    return -2;‍
  }
  else‍
    outputfolder = CommandLine["o"];

‍  // Note: We default to 96 dpi if the parameter was not provided.
  if (CommandLine["d"] != null)‍
    dpi = Convert.ToInt32(CommandLine["d"]);
‍
  if (CommandLine["t"] != null)
  {‍
    switch (CommandLine["t"].ToUpper())
    {‍
      case "TIF":
      case "TIFF":‍
        imagetype = ImageType.TIFF;
        break;‍
      case "BMP":
        imagetype = ImageType.BMP;‍
        break;
      case "JPEG":‍
      case "JPG":
        imagetype = ImageType.JPG;  ‍
      break;
      case "PNG":‍
      default:
        imagetype = ImageType.PNG;‍
        break;
    }‍
  }
‍
  if (CommandLine["r"] != null)
  {‍
    pagerange = CommandLine["r"];
  }‍

  DoConversion(pdfFile, password, outputfolder, dpi, pagerange, imagetype);‍

The code above takes care of setting up the arguments to hand off to DoConversion. So lets say we have a pdf file at c:\mypdfs\pdftest.pdf that is encrypted with a user password of "mypassword" and we want to make JPEG images of pages 1-5, 7, 8 with a dpi of 127 and put these images in c:\myimages. The commandline would look like this:

PDFtoImage.exe -f:c:\mypdfs\pdftest.pdf -p:mypassword -o:c:\myimages -d:127
-t:JPG -r:1-5,7,8

Note: -p -d -t and -r are optional. No password is used if -p is missing. DPI will default to 96, and image type will default to PNG. If -r is missing, all pages will be used to make images.

The DoConversion function is the meat of the project. First we set the trial license:

  // Setup the license
  SolidFramework.License.ActivateDeveloperLicense();

It then loads the PDF file with password if supplied:

  // Load up the document
  SolidFramework.Pdf.PdfDocument doc =
    new SolidFramework.Pdf.PdfDocument(file, password);

  doc.Open();

After the document is open, we check to see if the output folder exists, and if it doesn't, we create it:

  // Setup the outputfolder
  if (!Directory.Exists(folder))
  {
    Directory.CreateDirectory(folder);
  }
  // Setup the file string.
  string filename = folder + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar +
    Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(file);

Now walk the Pages dictionary and finds the page items by following the references.

  // Get our pages.
  List<SolidFramework.Pdf.Plumbing.PdfPage> Pages =
    new List<SolidFramework.Pdf.Plumbing.PdfPage>(doc.Catalog.Pages.PageCount);

  SolidFramework.Pdf.Catalog catalog =
    (SolidFramework.Pdf.Catalog)SolidFramework.Pdf.Catalog.Create(doc);

  SolidFramework.Pdf.Plumbing.PdfPages pages =
    (SolidFramework.Pdf.Plumbing.PdfPages)catalog.Pages;

  ProcessPages(ref pages, ref Pages)

Then if a page range is specified, parse the argument into page number integers. For each page that is specified, or all if not specified.

  // Check for page ranges
  PageRange ranges = null;
  bool bHaveRanges = false;
  if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(pagerange))
  {
    bHaveRanges = PageRange.TryParse(pagerange, out ranges);
  }

  if (bHaveRanges)
  {
    int[] pageArray = ranges.ToArray();
    foreach (int number in pageArray)
    {
      CreateImageFromPage(Pages[number], dpi, filename, number, extension, format);
      Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Processed page {0} of {1}", number,
      Pages.Count));
    }
  }
  else
  {
    // For each page, save off a file.
    int pageIndex = 0;
    foreach (SolidFramework.Pdf.Plumbing.PdfPage page in Pages)
    {
      // Update the page number.
      pageIndex++;

      CreateImageFromPage(page, dpi, filename, pageIndex, extension, format);
      Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Processed page {0} of {1}", pageIndex,
      Pages.Count));
    }
  }

We load each requested Page object and request a bitmap from that object. We then request that the bitmap object save itself to a file in the output directory with the requested ImageFormat type.

  private static void   CreateImageFromPage(SolidFramework.Pdf.Plumbing.PdfPage page,
    int dpi, string filename, int pageIndex, string extension,
    System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat format)
  {
    // Create a bitmap from the page with set dpi.
    Bitmap bm = page.DrawBitmap(dpi);

    // Setup the filename. 
    string filepath = string.Format(filename + "-{0}.{1}", pageIndex, extension);
    // If the file exits already, delete it. I.E. Overwrite it. 
    if (File.Exists(filepath))
      File.Delete(filepath);

    // Save the file. 
    bm.Save(filepath, format);

    // Cleanup. 
    bm.Dispose();
  }

And there you have it. The requested images should have been created in the specified output directory. Since we are using the free developer trial license, each page image will have a watermark at the bottom if the page. To remove this watermark, read more about an annual license for the Solid Framework Tools Edition here ($250 or $500 per year depending on distribution, no royalties).

Have any thoughts that you'd like to share? Please contact us with your feedback.

App Domain Switches and Solid Framework

2009-08-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

It has come to our attention that there is an issue with Solid Framework finding its support files when 3rd party assemblies are being used. The problem manifests itself as "Cannot find framework.dll" exception.

To work around this issue your license call, or instance of the LicenseCollection Object should be placed at the very beginning of your application. This license call should happen before any other 3rd party assembly is called.

The 3rd party assemblies can change the App Domain and then the call to Solid Framework fails. It looks within the App Domain searching for its support resources and when it doesn’t find them it assumes they have already been extracted and tries to load them.

We have tracked this down with Oracle and other assemblies and fixed the bug. We should be releasing a new version of Solid Framework sometime in the next week.

Extracting Solid Framework support files.

2009-08-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

Developers may need to extract the support files in Solid Framework for a couple of reasons.

To use the native C++ interface
Running scripts with SolidScript.exe

To facilitate this issue, we have uploaded a small console app that works with Solid Framework version 225 or greater here. Place the exe anywhere you like and run it with 2 parameters. The first parameter is the full path to Solid Framework.dll, and the second parameter is the path to where you want the extracted files to be placed.

Example:

ExtractFramework.exe "c:\development\Solid Framework\SoldFramework.dll" "d:\My Files\Framework"

This will extract the support files from SolidFramework.dll sitting in c:\development\Solid Framework to the location d:\My Files\Framework.

Note: We wrapped both paths with quotes on the command line because of spaces in the folder names. If your path has spaces, you should also use quotes.

Solid Framework now does PDF/A

2009-07-01T12:56:00.000-07:00

Solid Documents provides a free online PDF/A Validation service that uses our recently released Solid Framework v6 SDK behind the scenes. Solid Framework is now available through an enterprise licensing model. The Tools and Professional levels include PDF/A Validation and PDF to PDF/A conversion functionality.

The PDF/A Competence Center has a test suite for validating PDF/A Validators called the Isartor Test Suite.

Evaluate for Yourself

An easy way to test drive our PDF/A Validation technology is to download the Isartor Test Suite (4MB ZIP) and then simply submit this ZIP file to our online PDF/A (ISO 19005 -1) validation service.

The online service will validate all 205 files in the ZIP and e-mail you an XML report, in Open Compliance Report format, containing the PDF/A violations found in these file. All of the 205 files should exhibit errors, including the Isartor Test Suite Manual.

1. Download isartor-pdfa-2008-08-13.zip from http://www.pdfa.org/

2. Go to http://www.validatepdfa.com/ and step through the wizard.

3. Attach isartor-pdfa-2008-08-13.zip to the e-mail.

4. Sit back and wait for the response from our free validation service.

5. Examine the report to confirm that our PDF/A Validator is 100% compliant.

Convert PDF files to DOC Programmatically using ASP.NET

2008-09-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

One common topic in e-mails we receive is whether Solid Framework can be used in a web application or not.

Solid Framework can be integrated into an ASP.NET project. A simple example how this might work is below:

(screen shot from the sample project)

This page provides the means for the end user to select a PDF file they wish to convert to DOC, select several conversion options and then type in their contact details so that the result may be e-mailed back to them. Clicking the Convert PDF to DOC button starts the upload and conversion process.

You can download the sample ASP.NET project [zip file] to see this in action for yourself. Those without Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 can use Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 for free to work with the sample project.

Most of the project is implementation and doesn't require careful study. Two sections you'll likely want to look at in the C# code-behind file are below:

This creates a new PdfToWordConverter object that you'll use to convert the PDF file to DOC. It checks the properties of several server controls on the page and sets the converter object's properties based on their values and then converts the file.

This code creates a new MailMessage, attached the converted DOC file, creates a new SmtpClient, attaches the message and sends it. Those wanting to modify this should look at the MSDN documentation for the System.Net.Mail namespace.

Configuration of the outgoing mail server settings (among other things) can be done in the web.config file in the project.

Assuming that you're using the default syntax highlighting in Microsoft Visual Web Developer just look for the friendly green comments in the web.config file for instructions. If you've configured the syntax highlighting to use an unfriendly color for comments we apologize in advance.

Note: Solid Framework is sold and licensed as a royalty-free SDK. Please review the Solid Framework licensing conditions and contact us if you need clarification.

Have any thoughts that you'd like to share? Please contact us with your feedback.

Reading and Writing Secure PDF Files

2008-01-15T16:19:00.001-08:00

One of the most common unattended batch PDF processes is to apply standardized access permissions and encryption to all documents. This may be done as a stand-alone utility that uses a watched folder on your network or integrated into your document workflow system.

With a Solid Framework Free license you can use PdfDocument to open an encrypted PDF file, assuming that you know either the owner or user password. With a Solid Framework Tools license you can write changes back to the PDF which means you can add, remove or alter the security settings.

The PdfDocument class is all you need in order to master PDF security using Solid Framework. The steps involved are:

Open() - opening an existing PDF file (with or without a password)
EncryptionAlgorithm - choosing an encryption algorithm
OwnerPassword and UserPassword - setting new passwords
Permissions: setting user access permissions for the PDF file
Save() or SaveAs() - saving the modified PDF file

Open
As usual with these examples, please start by getting one of the samples like pdfcreator working. That will ensure that your license is working. Then we'll remove the code in the body of the Main method. Keep the License.Import(..) call.

Make sure you have the following using statements:

using SolidFramework;
using SolidFramework.Plumbing;
using SolidFramework.Pdf;
using SolidFramework.Pdf.Plumbing;

For convenience, we can still use the InputPath and OutputPath from JobSettings. Edit JobSettings to make InputPath point to your existing PDF file. Make OutputPath point to where you want the resulting PDF file stored.

Create a new PdfDocument as follows:

PdfDocument document = new PdfDocument();

Set the properties including the owner password if the file is protected. The user password would give you readonly access to the file. To modify it, you need to use the owner password.

document.Path = JobSettings.Default.InputPath;
document.OwnerPassword = "owner";

And then load the file.

document.Open();

EncryptionAlgorithm

If the file was already secure then its EncryptionAlgorithm will be set. You have several choices but you cannot leave this property Undefined if you wish to use password security.

RC440Bit is of legacy interest only. In the past there were performance issues and there are also export compliance issues related to the more secure 128 bit algorithms. AES is a more recent addition to the PDF standard than RC4 and RC4 is still a proprietary algorithm owned by RSA. It is also the most commonly used algorithm.

Make your choice and set it like this:

document.EncryptionAlgorithm = EncryptionAlgorithm.RC4128Bit;

OwnerPassword and UserPassword
There are two levels of access to a PDF file:

Owner - the author (owner) has this level of access to modify the document permissions allowed to users. The owner always has all permissions.
User - the user's permissions are restricted by the owner.

We'll set both passwords so that we can examine all the security features. It is possible to create PDF files with only the owner password. Obviously you will want to use much stronger passwords that include the odd number or special character. Remember that passwords are also case sensitive.

document.OwnerPassword = "newowner";
document.UserPassword = "user";

Permissions

These values can be or'd to give any combination of permissions to your users like this:

document.Permissions = AccessPermissions.Printing | AccessPermissions.AccessForDisabilities;

If you set the UserPassword then users will need to enter this password when they open the PDF file. After that, the restrictions based on AccessPermissions apply.
If you leave the UserPassword blank then users will not need to enter any password but the document will still be restricted by AccessPermissions. Opening the document and entering the owner password will give full permissions to the owner.

Save or SaveAs
Now it is time to save your PDF document to a new file. Assuming your OutputPath is set to a good location, you just need two more lines of code. Without ForceOverwrite there will be an exception thrown if the file already exists.

document.OverwriteMode = OverwriteMode.ForceOverwrite;
document.SaveAs(JobSettings.Default.OutputPath);

Complete Sample Snippet

// create
PdfDocument document = new PdfDocument();

// set
document.Path = JobSettings.Default.InputPath;
document.OwnerPassword = "owner";

// call
document.Open();

// set
document.EncryptionAlgorithm = EncryptionAlgorithm.RC4128Bit;

document.OwnerPassword = "newowner";
document.UserPassword = "user";

document.Permissions = AccessPermissions.Printing | AccessPermissions.AccessForDisabilities;

document.OverwriteMode = OverwriteMode.ForceOverwrite;

// call
document.SaveAs(JobSettings.Default.OutputPath);

Better PDF Creation from Word

2007-12-27T15:48:00.000-08:00

ShellPrintProvider vs WordPrintProvider
The starting point for many developers using Solid Framework is the simple pdfcreator sample. This tiny program demonstrates the shortest path to creating PDF files from just about any document on a Windows system.

ShellPrintProvider
Using ShellPrintProvider, three or four statements are all that is needed to create a PDF file:

The ShellPrintProvider uses Windows Explorer to launch the application associated with the file type you are trying to convert. This only works if the application in question supports the shell “print” verb. In addition, print providers can use any of the supported Solid Documents PDF creation printer drivers. This example requires the Solid PDF Creator printer driver to be installed (but does not require a Solid PDF Creator license).

Advantages of ShellPrintProvider:

works with most Windows applications capable of printing
relies on Explorer Shell commands rather than proprietary APIs which may vary with different versions of applications

Disadvantages of ShellPrintProvider

no control over the UI of the Windows application (even Word can get stuck on a simple print margins warning dialog)
limited to what can be printed (no access to original Document Properties for example)

WordPrintProvider

WordPrintProvider is a custom PrintProvider designed to work directly with Microsoft Word via the Office API. Since Word is being driven through an API this gives Solid Framework much more control over the process. Failures can be communicated as exceptions to your program rather than UI warnings to the end user. In addition, Word can be used to examine the original document and provide support for features that would not be possible by simple printing such as the original Document Properties. To illustrate this, use File Properties in Word to add properties to your Word test document like this:

Now make two simple changes to the original pdfcreator sample:

replace the two instances of ShellPrintProvider with WordPrintProvider
add printer.PreserveProperties = true;

When you run the sample application and then examine File Properties for the resulting PDF file in Acrobat Reader you should see that your Document Properties from the original Word document have been preserved. You should also notice a lot less UI “noise” from Microsoft Word during the creation process.