Inspired by a blog article by Edwin Biemond, I decided to try it out myself: previewing an PDF document in an image. However, Edwin used jPedal (http://www.jpedal.org/), a commercial product. It is not extremely expensive – but not freely available., So I decided to look a little further for a truly open source and free product. I found PDF Renderer, published by Sun Microsystems:https://pdf-renderer.dev.java.net/ .It could easily do for me what I was looking for.

As an additional step, I also used iText – http://www.lowagie.com/iText/download.html – an open source project that support programmatic generation of PDF document from Java.

Within half an hour, I had a program running that generated the following preview of the first page of a dynamically produced PDF document:

 

(more…)