I am working on an application where I need to do the following.
- Let user upload .pdf document
- User defines several rectangular areas on document
- Later, another user will insert images into these rectangular areas
The only part that is tripping me up is letting the user define the rectangular area on the document. I could let the user enter coordinates, but that isn't very user friendly. I would rather let the user click on the document to define where the rectangles should be.
My first thought was to render the pdf as an image, then collect the coordinates where the user clicks on the image. The two issues I had with this were 1) finding a way to render the pdf as an image, and 2) multiple page documents would probably get crazy when it comes to translating the coordinates from the image to the pdf.
I've been using PdfSharp to manipulate the files. To my knowledge, neither PdfSharp nor iTextSharp provide a way to render a pdf file as an image.
I think that I could get away with even collecting just a single coordinate (e.g., the top left corner of the rectangle).
PdfSharp doesn't render but it is now integrated and shipped with MigraDoc which does that. In the Document Viewer Demo of MigraDoc, you have an option that generates PNG files.