The majority of the traditional viewers are standalone interactive programs running on a personal computer. But meanwhile viewers are also available as seamlessly integrated controls in a user dialog of applications such as MS Access etc. Or, viewers can be found in embedded systems such as a display unit of an airplane. Some viewers are specialized tools in digital signature applications called "secure viewer". And nowadays viewers are part of web applications running on a the HTML and Java Script platform of a common web browser.
Most navigation functions such as scrolling pages, jumping to bookmarks, zooming, rotating etc. are self-evident. On top of these basic functions some viewers provide a wide variety of tools of more or less useful functions to manipulate a PDF document. The most requested functions, however, are:
- adding annotations
- filling out forms
- applying digital signatures
There are more complex functions such as assembling documents from different source documents but this function is usually out of the scope of a simple viewer application and is provided as specialized tool.
In order to cover the needs of our customers we have developed viewer components for various technologies such as .NET, Java and ActiveX. Based on these viewer components we also provide a PDF Document Assembler Tool. The newest component is a pure Java Script viewer running in web browsers. I will post separate articles on some of these topics.
As always, I appreciate your feedback on this article.
