Custom PDF Viewer

J

joe_pool_is

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We have a client that wants us to create a custom viewer for an electronic document that he is selling for hundreds of dollars.

His document is in PDF format, which can be embedded in a project as a resource and displayed at runtime.

However, the only way I can see to display it is to reference the Adobe Reader. If I do that, Adobe's interface gives everyone the ability to save the file or print the file.

We need to cripple this system so that these documents can be viewed only, and they have to be viewed in our interface.

Is there some way to do this? If we have to get away from PDF, what is another format that we could use?
 
I don't think you'll ever prevent anyone from taking a screenshot and printing it; that said, it may be the most simple to print the PDF to a series of .tif files and then use System.Drawing to render these to your form. Just a thought.
 
If someone wants to use Print Screen, that's their business. They can screenshot all 600 pages of his book, and I'm not even going to try to block it. ;)

I was thinking about converting the PDFs to a series of images; there are tools I can download to convert all of the files in a batch. That might be a good idea.
 
I think that is probably your best bet; it will also prevent users from copy/pasting directly, they could use some type of OCR, but it will stop the casual copy.
 
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