UWP Simple PDF viewer

Some months ago, I blogged about how to display PDF files in your UWP app: Displaying PDF files in a UWP app

When I look at the stats of my blog, I notice that that particular blogpost gets a lot of visitors. Also, I regularly get mails from people having questions about displaying PDF files in a UWP app.

So, I figured out that this is something a lot of developers seem to need or want to use. And that’s why I thought I’d make a custom control for this exact purpose.

You can find the control, together with the source code, on my GitHub: SimplePdfViewer

Usage:

Example usage

<Grid Background="{ThemeResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}">
    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
        <ColumnDefinition Width="250" />
        <ColumnDefinition Width="*" />
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
    <StackPanel>
        <Button Content="Local PDF" Tapped="{x:Bind OpenLocal}" />
        <Button Content="Remote PDF" Tapped="{x:Bind OpenRemote}" />
    </StackPanel>
    <controls:SimplePdfViewerControl Grid.Column="1"
        Source="{x:Bind Source, Mode=OneWay}"
        AutoLoad="True"
        IsZoomEnabled="true"
        VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 
        HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
        />
</Grid>

Result:

pdf print screen

If you have any suggestions for this control, please let me know! I’ll try to gradually keep on improving this control.

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Archived comments (5)

Archived comments from the original blog, preserved here for reference. Join the discussion above.

  2. Abellard Joseph
    Thanks on this post very interesting, I am creating a hosted universal windows apps based on my WordPress document library. I have couple pages with PDF file and when I click on it app crashed, can you please give me some idea. Thanks again
  3. Riani
    great article, thank you for sharing
  4. shalinivathra
    Hi, Your post is very useful. Thanks for this. i am totally new in windows UWP app development. I tried to do write bridge this in react-native for windows uwp. <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> How can i achieve this is programatically?.. you just add it in pdfpages and its biniding in xaml file. i need to do this in programatically. Could you please help me?..
  5. PieEatingNinjasauthorIn reply
    Sorry for my late reply... If you don't want to use databinding, you can just loop over your collection of PDF pages (which are BitmapImages), foreach page create a new Image and add this image to your view. In pseudo code it would look something like this: foreach(BitmapImage img in pdfPages) { var image = new Image(); image.Source = img; myUIElement.Add(image); } If it's not clear, please feel free to reach out on GitHub where you can drop some code so I can help you out.