Document viewer API for fat client in .NET

Hello, we are currently evaluating GroupDocs .Net. One of our main use cases is viewing and conversion for a fat client. I notices the samples you have for MVC and WebForms, but what would be the recommended viewing stategy/best practice for a fat client? Conversion to an image format and show the image format with a custom text layer above? Or use HTML conversion? Other options?
Thanks!

@wolfgang.gogg,

It all depends upon your requirements as well as on how the application is going to be used on the client-side. In case the application supports viewing HTML documents, rendering into HTML is preferable. In case it doesn’t, you can make use of rendering into image or PDF. Furthermore, if the users should be prohibited from copying/pasting the content, rendering into PNG or JPG is recommended.

The only reason this approach is recommended to be used is when you want to prohibit copy/paste but allow the text search. In case you want any further details, please share more information about the specifics of your system, i.e. client-side application, requirements and limitations.

Hello,

thanks for the feedback. This helped a lot.
For sure it also triggered some follow up questions.

Can we customize the html generated somehow? F.ex. having a different background color, border around the pages etc?
Can we also generate one html containing all pages and/or do you have a sample or best practice how something like this could be done (scrollable view of all pages)?
What is the advantage of using external resources - it seems every page has/generates its own and no resources are shared between pages?
In your MVC and WebForms sample you seem to render to png not html - any reason why?
Any known issues Html rendering has as opposed to PDF rendering or image rendering?

Thanks in advance!

@wolfgang.gogg,

GroupDocs.Viewer doesn’t provide any builtin functions to customize the generated HTML. However, once the API has generated the HTML pages, you can manipulate them on your own.

You can either merge the generated HTML pages on your own or use GroupDocs.Merger for .NET.

Yes, the HTML pages don’t share common resources and each page has it’s own resources (styles, graphics and fonts). In this case the size of the HTML pages become less.

These applications provide both options, HTML-based rendering and image-based rendering and you can choose the option which is appropriate for your scenario.

At the moment, there are not any known issues with HTML based rendering.