Q: We are a small engineering software development company. We would
like to be able to generate 3D PDF output from within our program. I
saw U3D sample project which comes as part of PDFNet SDK distribution
and it is n line with what we are looking for. Does PDFNet provide
any method or API to create the U3D itself ?
Or just providing a way to embed U3D into PDF file? Would you please
provide a comparison data between PDFNet and PDF3D, if possible?
----------------
A: Using PDFNet SDK (www.pdftron.com/net) you can extract any data
stream from PDF including U3D and PCR streams.
You can use PDFNet SDK to embed U3D and PCR models when creating new
or editing existing PDF documents. It is also possible to extract U3D
files, to modify 3D annotation dictionaries etc.
As a starting point you may want to take a look at U3DTest sample
project:
http://www.pdftron.com/net/samplecode.html#U3D
Please keep in mind that PDFNet does not include API-s to
programmatically parse or generate U3D files. In case you also need
this type of functionality, you may want to try Intel's free U3D
library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/u3d/). The other library you
mentioned (PDF3D) is under the hood using exactly the same Intel
library. Because you would use PDFNet and Intel library directly
(without any wrapper layer), you have more control.