PDF Viewer

[John J. Lee]

Pepe Pena <jramirez08063 at yahoo.com> writes:

> I am new to programming and need some guidance on the development of
> the following application.  The proposed application will display
> two pdf documents simultaneously to be viewed and simple navigation
> will be facilitated (i.e. turning pages).
> 
> Furthermore, the pdf documents must be linked to one another.  If a
> particular page is viewed in one document, the second document will
> display a specific page.
> 
> Can anyone please provide any assistance or comments on how I should
> proceed to create the mentioned application using Python within the
> windows environment, thank you.

I believe Acrobat (NOT Acrobat Reader) supports a COM interface you
could use from Python (with ctypes, maybe even with pywin32 -- not
sure if it supports IDispatch).

Alternatively, if you feel rather adventurous, try compiling KPDF on
Windows with the free Qt3 port(s?) or Qt4, if that's arrived yet.  If
you're successful there, you still need to figure out writing KPart
plugins in Python, which certainly used to be tricky, but maybe that's
a solved problem by now...


Alternatively, if this was just an idea for a toy project rather than
work and you don't have Acrobat and/or lots of spare time, my advice
is to pick a different problem, and learn Ctrl-Shift-L and
Ctrl-Shift-K in Acrobat Reader instead, which have served me well in
my work at ReportLab (which does involve some work with PDF files, as
you might expect!-).  Even more embarrassingly high-tech <wink>, and
even more useful for comparing two PDFs IME: holding two superimposed
printouts up to the light from a window (yes, we have a tool that lets
us do this, but the print-it-out-and-hold-it-up method seems to have
won the popularity contest, maybe thanks to the excellent "slide the
pages around" UI for comparing parts of a page that may have moved
from one file to the other...).


John