Java document viewer toolkit overview

The Java™ document viewer toolkit supports viewing, annotation, and manipulation of various document formats. These formats are primarily: TIFF, PDF, MO:DCA (containing IOCA, PTOCA), GIF, JPEG, PCX, bitmap, and text documents and Microsoft™ Office documents by using a bridge to Oracle Outside In Technology.

You can extend the viewer to support other document formats, by writing document engines that are classes that provide document format-specific functions.

The Java document viewer toolkit provides the following capabilities:

Multiple-document interface with several different layouts including tab and side-by-side layouts. Side-by-side viewing enables two different views of a single document or two different documents. The views can be configured horizontally or vertically and edited independently.
When you are viewing two document views in side-by-side layout, you have the option of locking the scroll bars so that both document views can be scrolled simultaneously.
Thumbnails view of the pages of a document: Clicking a thumbnail of a page to moves to that page. The currently visible area on the page is indicated by a red rectangle. You can drag or resize the rectangle to move to a different section in the page or to rescale the page.
Thumbnails can be configured either to be docked or to float in a separate window. Configuring thumbnails to be visible in a floating window allows you to view a document and the thumbnails simultaneously in separate windows.
Configurable, dockable toolbars.
Customizable pop-up menus and action objects for all menu items, which can be used to build a menu bar.
Rotating, zooming, inverting, and enhancing pages.
Image contrast adjustment and balance of pages in the Java document viewer. The Balance window has slider controls and text fields to adjust the brightness and contrast.
Page and document navigation: first, next, previous, last page, and jump to a page.
Fit to width, height, and to window.
Printing, including the selection of pages to print and the ability to add custom options to control the printing of additional information. Customization capabilities also allow an application to provide a watermark on printed pages.
Creating and editing graphical annotations. The annotation types provided include box, circle, line, arrow, text, highlight, sticky note, pen, and stamp. Stamp annotations can be either text or images.
Page manipulation, including copying, reordering, rotating, and deleting pages in image-paged document formats and the ability to save the changed document.
Multiple selection of pages in the thumbnails, which is useful for rotation and other manipulations.
Copying and pasting of annotations and pages within a document and between documents.
Copying of a selected area of a page to the clipboard (for pasting in another application).
Undo and redo for operations that modify the document, such as editing annotations and page manipulation.
Page filtering: This feature allows an application to display a subset of the pages of a document. This capability is provided through the programming interface only.
The ability to export a document, which can include annotations, to the file system.
User controllable preferences, which are saved locally and are used in subsequent viewer sessions. These preferences include document settings for zoom and rotation, viewer settings for size and visibility of thumbnails, location and visibility of toolbars, and annotation settings for each annotation type (for example, border and fill color). Classes are provided to add custom preferences.
The ability to use an optical character recognition engine. This capability allows the viewer to recognize and extract textual content from an image document so that its text can be searched and selected. The selected text can then be copied and pasted to other applications, such as Microsoft Word.
The ability to recognize text from PDF to be used by search and select. The selected text can then be copied and pasted to other applications, such as Microsoft Word.

The following screen capture is an example of a generic Java document viewer that uses all of the default settings.