Reviews

Review: PDFtoolkit Professional

Gnostice PDFtoolkit 1.0 ActiveX/.NET
$299
Gnostice Information Technologies
Bangalore, India
+91-80-2336-7206
www.gnostice.com

PDFtoolkit is a management application for Adobe Acrobat documents. It does not let you create a PDF file from scratch. But it does let you perform a number of potentially useful tasks with such documents:

  • Insert or delete pages
  • Add watermarks or thumbnails
  • Extract pages to a new document
  • Create or manipulate bookmarks
  • Work with Acrobat forms

The last is potentially the most interesting for automation scenarios. PDFtoolkit lets you fill out Acrobat forms from code, or read the field names and values from existing forms. This gives you a way to integrate Acrobat forms functionality directly in your applications.

The product installs an ActiveX control and a batch of ActiveX and .NET demos. The .NET versions use COM interop to work with the control; there's no native managed code version, but they seem to work fine. Gnostice also has a batch of other Acrobat-oriented products on their Web site, and you can download a trial version.

By the way, this is one of the products that I first heard about through the Xtras.NET Developer Network; it was one of the three products that were free to subscribers this month.

About the Author

Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.