PDF-file rendering with OpenGL?

Hi!

Is there any possibility to view/render PDF (or other document-types) with OpenGL?

Any libraries for doing this? Functions in OpenGL/GLUT? Other?

-Thanks!

Torbjørn

Hi !

Sure you can do it, I am not sure why you would like to do it though ?, I don’t know of any code to do it and the OpenGL API is not very useful for that kind of rendering, but have a look at the source for xpdf for example (that’s a Linux app for viewing pdf files).

Mikael

Thanks!

The reason that I want to show PDF-files is that my application is supposed to show documentation of different kind that already exists on PDF-format.

The information could of course be converted to other formats, but I would like to be able to actually download a pdf-file from the Internet, and then display it as a 3D-object (one page at the time, visualized as a paper/book).

By the way! To all of the rest of you folks: Please feel free to let me know if you have other suggestions/code samples to render PDF with OpenGL :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Torbjørn

I believe .PDF is a proprietary format - but heres an idea - perhaps there is some way you could utilize the acrobat plug-in to render pages of a PDF file to a window or some kind of DC and then generate a DIB for use as a texture in OpenGL.

I feel that actually writing a PDF file renderer would take probably as long if not longer than Adobe actually took to make theirs in the first place

Maybe, just maybe it might be worth asking Adobe about this directly via. their support address?