Foxit PDF Viewing

What is PDF Viewing?

PDF documents are files that consist of everything needed to visualize the document. Things like fonts and graphics are stored separately inside the file alongside a technical description of how the page should look. All of these elements are combined together by the PDF software and, almost magically, transformed into a visual representation of each page.

This technical page description is vitally important as it allows any document to look exactly the same way on any device with a visual fidelity matching exactly the way the document author/designer meant it to look. This process of visualizing the PDF is known as rendering.

However, a PDF is not simply an electronic version of paper and the job of the PDF viewer isn’t only to display the page. There is a rich interactive layer that exists over the the pages, including hyperlinks, form fields, bookmarks, thumbnails and optional content groups. This UI layer allows the end user to interact with the document and it is in providing this interactivity where Foxit’s PDF viewing technologies shine.

Many document workflows are dynamic in nature. End users often need to fill forms, add annotations and make other changes to their documents. This editing process is fundamental to the PDF viewing experience.

Interactive Document Viewing in the palm of your hand

PDF documents are well suited to viewing on a multitude of devices, from desktop computers to mobile devices such as phones and tablets. Smaller screens provide certain challenges when a large amount of data needs to be presented in a limited amount of space. Foxit’s reflow technologies allow certain documents to be interpreted in a semantic way with the visual presentation adjusted to ensure optimum usage of the limited space available.

The user interface on mobile is quite different to that on desktop devices. In particular, users make use of multi-touch and gestures to navigate around a mobile document compared to using a keyboard and mouse. Foxit has dedicated a significant amount of effort to optimizing this mobile experience.

While mobile device capabilities have improved over the years there are still major limitations. One issue in particular is that many mobile devices have small amounts of memory. Many software vendors are forced to aim to the higher end of devices. In contrast, Foxit is a pioneer the field of Out Of Memory (OOM) handling.

During PDF rendering, the Foxit software continually monitors the memory used by the device and various strategies are employed to keep the memory usage as low as possible. Our customers can be confident that their PDF viewing solution will work across a wide variety of devices spanning the full range of low-end to high-end devices.

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PDF Viewing

public void renderPage(int index) {
  PDFDoc doc = Common.loadPDFDoc(mContext, mPath, null);
  String outputFilePath = "test.jpg";
  PDFPage pdfPage = Common.loadPage(mContext, doc,
    index, PDFPage.e_ParsePageNormal);

  // Create the bitmap and erase its background.
  Bitmap bitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap((int)pdfPage.getWidth(),
    (int)pdfPage.getHeight(), Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888);
  bitmap.eraseColor(Color.WHITE);

  Matrix2D matrix = pdfPage.getDisplayMatrix(0, 0,
    (int)pdfPage.getWidth(), (int)pdfPage.getHeight(),
    Constants.e_Rotation0);

    Renderer renderer = new Renderer(bitmap, true);

    // Render the page to bitmap.
    Progressive progressive = renderer.startRender(pdfPage, matrix,
      null);
    int state = Progressive.e_ToBeContinued;
    while (state == Progressive.e_ToBeContinued) {
        state = progressive.resume();
    }
    progressive.delete();
    if (state == Progressive.e_Error) {
      // Error
      return;
    }

    // Save the render result to the jpeg image
    if (false == Common.SaveImageFile(bitmap,
      Bitmap.CompressFormat.JPEG, outputFilePath)) {
        // Failed to save
        return;
      }

    renderer.delete();
    pdfPage.delete();
    Common.releaseDoc(mContext, doc);
  }
}