I worked with your dotnet samples. As I understand editable formats (like docx etc.) are converted to pdf before annotating. Is it true?
Hello,
Thank you for your interest in GroupDocs. In fact, the real state of things is a little different.
GroupDocs.Annotation contains GroupDocs.Viewer inside, so when you open the “input” document, it is converted to the browser-understandable format (HTML+CSS+JS+images), and then is sending to the browser, which displays it as a standard web-page. All intermediate files can be found on the server in the “/temp” subfolder.
Then, when you add the annotation to the document, GroupDocs.Annotation doesn’t embed (insert) this annotation inside the document at that moment, but stores the annotation-related data in the database on the server (it can be SQL Server, SQL Server Compact or JSON storage).
And only when you click the “Export” button, GroupDocs.Annotation generates the “output” document, which is a copy of the input/original document with annotations embedded inside it.
If the “input” document is the one of any of supported formats, except the DOCX, then while exporting the “output” document will be present in the PDF. However when “input” document is a DOCX, then when clicking the “Export” button you will be able to download “output” document in both PDF and DOCX formats (both with embedded annotations inside). Screenshot below illustrates this menu.
If you will have more questions please feel free to contact us.