PDF Conversion to HTML5

Technical Support Apryse SDK
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Q:

I’m interested in using your product to convert PDF documents to HTML5. I tried your Webviewer online demo, and it did a good job converting my documents. I wanted to know some more details about licensing and using your product in my application.

  1. Is the document being converted to HTML5, or is it converted to XPS/XOD and then rendered by the Webviewer?

  2. I would like to convert the document to straight HTML5 and use my own viewer. Is that possible?

  3. For on premises conversion, which utility can be used to convert to HTML5? And is it available for Java or .Net?

I’m also interested in products that allow my to convert PDF documents to other formats with 100% fidelity, I want to eliminate dependency on Adobe Reader.

A:

  1. Is the document being converted to HTML5, or
    is it converted to XPS/XOD and then rendered by
    the Webviewer?

The latter is happening. XOD is a variant of XPS designed to be easy to render in a web browser. This approach allows us to avoid many of the pitfalls of rendering the PDF directly in JS, as detailed in the following blog post:

http://blog.pdftron.com/2013/08/08/how-to-integrate-a-pdf-viewer-in-html5-apps/

  1. I would like to convert the document to straight
    HTML5 and use my own viewer. Is that possible?

It is. PDFNet can convert PDFs to high-quality fixed-format HTML (and ePub). The following blog post gives an overview:

http://blog.pdftron.com/2013/11/15/high-quality-epub-html-from-pdf/

  1. For on premises conversion, which utility can be
    used to convert to HTML5? And is it available for Java or .Net?

We have a couple of methods available to convert PDF to HTML.
One option is the PDFNet SDK Convert Add-On API, Convert.ToHTML():

http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/PDFNet/html/Overload_pdftron_PDF_Convert_ToHtml.htm
http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#Convert
http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/downloads.html

Note that this option is available for Java, .Net, and other platforms.

Another option is DocPub, a command-line tool for document conversion:

http://www.pdftron.com/webviewer/demo/viewer.html?d=/xod/PDFTron_DocPub_User_Manual.xod?&did=docs.docpub
http://www.pdftron.com/docpub/downloads.html

I’m also interested in products that allow my to convert
PDF documents to other formats with 100% fidelity, I
want to eliminate dependency on Adobe Reader. Thanks.

DocPub and the Convert Add-On can convert from PDF to SVG, EMF, XPS/XOD, HTML, and ePub.

[In case you’re interested in converting in the other direction: PDFNet can also convert from HTML and XPS to PDF. On Windows, PDFNet can convert from any printable format (including Office documents) to PDF, as long as a program able to print that format is installed on the machine.]