Access Specific PDF Page in WPF WebBrowser Control

Question

I have a webbrowser control in my application that is used to display pdf files that have been created in iTextSharp and are stored locally on the hard drive.

I would like to be able to navigate the file (next, previous, first, last, toc) from my application rather than using the inbuilt nav of the reader in the browser.

I have seen that you can navigate to specific pages by using

Browser.Navigate("filename.pdf#page=?);

This works the first time but when trying to navigate to a different page, it makes the browser disappear completely with no errors. However, I can reload the file without problem if I don't have the #page=? suffix on the file url though. Any ideas on this?

Alternatively, is there anyway in iTextSharp of adding something to the file to allow for it to be navigated from an external command?

Answer 1

All the official parameters that can be used to navigate through a PDF using parameters in the query string after the ? character are listed in a document published by Adobe: Parameters for Opening PDF Files

You already mentioned the page parameter. Another option could be using named destinations: nameddest=destination. In this case, you need to add the anchor with name destination to the file using iTextSharp.

Note that not all viewers implement these parameters. Adobe supports them in Adobe Reader and in the Adobe Reader plug-in, but there is no guarantee that they will work in pdf.js (Firefox), Pdfium (Google Chrome),... If your browser disappears when using an open parameter, you may have hit a bug in the browser or the viewer plug-in that causes the browser to crash. iTextSharp nor iText can crash a browser ;-)

There are no other ways you can navigate a PDF from an external application. The only thing you can do, is to add JavaScript to the PDF so that it always opens at the same page. This is done using an open action. I don't think this solves your problem as it would mean that you have to change the PDF file every time you want it to open at a different page.