I need to build a small PDF library that will display many catalogs, the user will be able to view the document and go thru pages but he will not be able to download or share the documents in any way, somehow to work like Google Books (here an example).
I have in mind something like the Google Drive API or some kind of Scribd API, but I don’t know if one of those will work, I would like to know if there are more options for these application or the mentioned before will do the job.
Edit: Forgot to mention, all this done in a web browser.
In principle all you need would be the ability to render pages from a PDF file into an image. Your application (you didn’t mention where you want to build this) is then responsible for displaying the images, scrolling, moving from page to page etc…
If this is correct there are multiple possible libraries that can do this:
– ImageMagick can convert PDF to images (http://www.imagemagick.org)
– GhostScript has extensions for PDF and can convert PostScript or PDF into images and other formats (http://www.ghostscript.com)
– I’m sure there are many, many more…
There are also a number of commercial tools, for example those from Adobe (licensed through DataLogics, http://www.datalogics.com) and callas software (http://www.callassoftware.com – I’m affiliated with this company)