Our newest version of PicaJet, will offer a drastically expanded list of supported media formats. Besides photos and videos, PicaJet will support many media formats, including PDF documents.
After many experiments, we settled on Quick PDF Library from Debenu (Melbourne, Australia).
Fast Rendering and Metadata Extracting
PicaJet is able to index a huge number of documents and media files. This made PDF rendering speed an extremely high priority for us. Quick PDF Library exhibited the best results coming out ahead of its more expensive competitors; it quickly renders even 1000-page documents.
Native .NET code and Cross-Platform
Initially, because Quick PDF Library is not a 100% pure .NET code, we excluded it from our list of potential candidates.
But after experimenting with other PDF libraries, we decided to come back to Quick PDF Library, because its other benefits outweighed this issue.
The developer with a solid background
This is not a big concern for home usage, but for DAM solutions, it is essential. All the product components must be solid, proven solutions from companies with reputable histories.
Accurate Rendering of PDF documents
Some of the tested libraries don’t support the rendering of CMYK images, and they were unable to produce 100% correctly rendered, complex PDF documents. Quick PDF Library, on the other hand, did this job very well. It supports PDF 1.8, and it reads and fixes some corrupted PDF documents, too.
PDF Native Metadata Writing
Currently, we don’t know of a PDF library that can write PDF native properties back to the PDF document without resaving the whole file. We resolved this issue partially with the Adobe XMP Toolkit that can write XMP metadata to PDF format. It would be nice if the Debenu team were to add this feature to future Quick PDF Library versions.
Cost
This is where the Quick PDF Library program shines. Unfortunately, there are no free open-source or free PDF libraries available to render PDF files. You can find many good components (for example, iTextSharp or SharpPDF) for creation of PDF documents, but none exist for rendering.
The most commercial PDF libraries are too expensive for startup, or small teams. Currently, the Quick PDF Library program costs $249 per single developer license. But don’t let the low price fool you, because many aspects of Quick PDF Library are superior to other expensive PDF rendering & creation libraries.
It took us about six months of experimenting before finally selecting Quick PDF Library from among all the other PDF libraries.
Quick PDF Library is not 100% pure .NET code, but it still renders PDF documents with maximal speed and quality; it supports CMYK images; it quickly extracts native PDF properties; it sells for a reasonable price. And it is backed by a company with a solid reputation and history of excellence.
