Display PDFs in LabVIEW without Adobe Reader?

[BertMcMahan]

I am trying to write a program to scrape some data from PDF's using Tabula, and I'd like to have an interface that lets users select a region of interest. To do this, I would like to display a PDF on a LabVIEW front panel and let the user drag a box to select it.*

I have tried adding an Adobe Reader ActiveX control to LV2018 32 bit using the examples floating around this forum, but it's giving me a very generic error ("There is a problem with Adobe Acrobat/Reader. If it is running, please exit and try again. (507:507)."). I've tried reinstalling it and searching for that error but can't seem to fix it.

Thus, I'd like to try using some other PDF viewer, but I can't seem to find one with either an ActiveX or .NET control. The Firefox built-in viewer works well, but I can't find a way to embed a Firefox window into LabVIEW either.

Any thoughts?

*Yes, I know that Tabula has an interface that lets a user select a region of the screen, but it requires a specific older version of Java RTE to do this, and the Java RTE requires a license for commercial use. Hence my recreating this in LabVIEW.

[mcduff]

I remember looking into this without any success.

Have you seen this

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/How-do-I-embedded-the-Chromium-Embedded-browser-in-LabVIEW/td-p/308...

If you can get that to work then you will have your viewer. Sorry I cannot offer any more help. If you do get it working please post the solution.

mcduff

[BertMcMahan]

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@mcduff wrote:

I remember looking into this without any success.

Have you seen this

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/How-do-I-embedded-the-Chromium-Embedded-browser-in-LabVIEW/td-p/308...

If you can get that to work then you will have your viewer. Sorry I cannot offer any more help. If you do get it working please post the solution.

mcduff

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No I hadn't seen that one, thank you. I did try to get a Webkit .NET control going but couldn't figure out where to get the dll's being discussed on that thread, so that gives me some hope. Thanks for the tip.

[mcduff]

Not sure of your application, but I wanted to embed a pdf viewer so a manual could be look at within LabVIEW. I ended up going the HTML route and just using the >NET viewer from Windows.

You might want to search if there is a .NET assembly to access Edge, the new MS browser. If so, that should work as it is based on Chromium. (This would be a Windows only solution.)

When I have some time, I'll look into  this, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/

You have piqued my interest again.

mcduff

[BertMcMahan]

That's basically what I was trying to do but couldn't figure out how to insert a Webview object as I didn't have it installed. The only source I could find with download instructions was for a package manager to install it into visual studio.

For the time being I just converted the PDF's into images to load up... it's not ideal but it worked for this application 🙂