Sorry if this is covered in a FAQ somewhere (please point me to it if there is one!) - but can the Viewer App be used in a closed network (no outside internet connection)? Is it a cloud based API? I am evaluating products for viewing PDFs in a closed network and this is pretty much the main criteria. Any information or advice appreciated!
GroupDocs.Viewer API comes in both cloud and stand-alone variants. As your requriements are to view documents within a closed network. You must go with GroupDocs.Viewer stand-alone API.
Can you please specify your development environment details (Java or .NET)? We’ll then assist you accordingly.
Appreciate your reply! I am glad to hear GroupDocs has a standalone version. The application that I want to develop will use a web browser to display a PDF, hopefully using your GroupDocs.Viewer.
On your products page, the one that states “View Portable Doucment [sic] Format (PDF) directly from your web browser” - that’s exactly what we want! We will use Java if that matters. Because of reasons not terrifically interesting here, the network environment has to be completely stand alone, so if we have a PDF, we would like to have the browser display it and do some basic manipulations using the API and not need to call a cloud server.
Thanks again!
Alright. Let us now guide you how this use-case could be implemented.
Brief API Introduction
Please note that GroupDocs.Viewer for Java is a back-end, UI-Agnostic API that could be implemented in any of your (new or existing) Java application without any platform or framework dependencies. Have a look at the minimum system requirements.
API Usage and Implementation
The core feature of the API is just to render a source document into PDF, HTML or Image format (depending on your business needs). Later, the resultant files could be displayed in any application (e.g. web browser, desktop application). And it depends on you how you want to display the output. Have a look at features overview and supported file formats.
You may find following resources helpful:
Developers guide
GitHub example projects
Video demo
Download JAR
Can you please elaborate this?
Thanks again! We’ll definitely be moving forward on the GroupDocs API in evaluations - thanks again for your explanations.
For manipulations on the API I should have mentioned it would be nice to insert annotations, highlights, and other markups for a PDF document, either in-browser or in the backend. If this can be done in the browser that would be excellent, but we could live with it needing to be done in the backend.
GroupDocs.Viewer doesn’t allow PDF or any other document manipulation. However, our sister company Aspose offers an API that allows you PDF manipulation. Please have a look at Aspose.PDF.