Big Faceless Organization (BFO) has announced the release of the Big Faceless Java PDF Viewer. The PDF Viewer is an addition to the company's existing portfolio, and will provide programmers with a tool for viewing and printing PDF documents.

In conjunction with BFO's PDF Library, the PDF Viewer allows documents to be loaded and displayed in Java using a Swing component. In addition, documents may be printed or converted to bitmap formats, using the Java Image API or the TIFF writer supplied with the extension.

The PDF library can now be used for the full lifecycle of a PDF - creation, editing and display. It also opens the door for further features are being worked on; these include text extraction, preflighting (i.e., checking to see if that document meets the requirements for printing, such as using CYMK colours and having embedded fonts) and more.

The PDF Viewer can be purchased as an extension to the PDF Library Extended with prices starting at $400. A fully functional free trial of the PDF Library and Viewer can be downloaded from BFO's website.

Printing or viewing a pdf document from a Java application is not an easy thing, two years ago i really struggled for that (only ugly work arounds worked but not always).. now BFO supports this, i say congrats. i am wondering if $400 extra viewer part is royalty free (should be..)?

While the PDF viewer API is a sensible addition to BFO's portfolio of PDF software, I don't think I would endorse paying $400 simply for viewing and printing PDFs. At my work there are many Swing applications that generate PDF reports, which are viewed and optionally printed. We use Adobe Acrobat Reader. Its free and its works great. Of course this solution assumes that the workstation can run Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Rob
http://jsourcery.com

How do you generate the PDFs? Do you use Apache's FOP?

We use Elixir, which is really just a wrapper for the itext open source API. I don't think anyone here is all that thrilled with Elixir, but we just haven't had time to evaluate what else is out there.

I'm currently using iText http://www.lowagie.com/iText/ to generate PDFs for viewing and printing with the Adobe reader. It is hosted on sourceforge and has a good amount of developer activity as well.

The API is pretty clean and easy to use. Documentation is pretty good as well with alot of example code.

I'm currently using iText http://www.lowagie.com/iText/ to generate PDFs for viewing and printing with the Adobe reader. It is hosted on sourceforge and has a good amount of developer activity as well.The API is pretty clean and easy to use. Documentation is pretty good as well with alot of example code.

And of course its free!

Indeed it is! .. and LGPL to boot!

i think you misunderstood the problem. i was talking about "viewing" and "printing" a pdf document from a PURE Java application. i still think you do not have much options there.

On one hand I agree with you, if your clients will have varying operating systems and you want to provide a universal solution, but on the other hand, most administrator maintained workstations will have a (free) pdf-viewer installed on them anyway. If you all you are doing is viewing and printing, like you said, I probably wouldn't use Java unless there is some other requirement you haven't mentioned.

Rob
http://jsourcery.com

There's also a usability issue. It's nice to be able to show the user a report inside the application they are using, and possibly to modify that report quickly while they change things. That is not possible going to Acrobat. The application I work on does as yours does, and it is a constant issue. Programmers tend to forget how real users view a computer (and how completel confused they are by ALT-Tab and multiple windows).

Another way around it, if you are already generating PDF, is to use JDIC and view the PDF inside an embedded web browser. JDIC can also be used to automatically print a generated PDF, making things much more seamless. I honestly can't imagine paying thousands of dollars to cover all the users of our system, so I don't see this PDF library in the cards.

That's assuming you're on a workstation - if you're on a server then remember Acrobat and Acrobat Reader are not licensed for use on a server.

JPedal (http://www.jpedal.org) includes both the ability to display and print PDFs and there is both a commerical and a GPL version.

It uses Java Printing Services to print PDFs directly and there is a tutorial on printing at http://www.jpedal.org/print_tut1.html

Regards,

MArkee

Of course this solution assumes that the workstation can run Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Adobe Reader (as it now seems to be called) comes on a number of platforms, although I suspect the Linux version is for x86 only.

There are alternatives available (KGhostView, gv), but I not sure how clever these are with PDF forms and other whizz bang features of Adobe Reader.