Display Thumbnails For Every Page Of A Document

Got an intresting case a few days back..  which lead me think about the ways of generating thumbnails of all the pages of a document. Now, why would you need it ?? well ..i don't know.. maybe you have an app and you want users to click on the thumbnails of a specific page to load it .. depends, like everything else in the world ..! but yes one thing i know is this *is* a very genuine requirement which many costomers have..as i have seen that there are many customers who come with a requirement of generating thumbnails for the pages of their word document.

If you have this requirement and if you want to do it for the first page, then great ! you've got a prebuilt sample (okay..i lied ! you'll need to customize it ..)https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/shareptthum.asp?frame=true

but ..But .. BUT .. this workaround has a few limitations:

1) It requires that the you've selected "Save preview picture" in the File-Properties dialog,

2) You will only get a preview of the first page in the document.

if you are okay with it ..its simple ! use it ! but if you want to have a preview of all the pages then what do you do .. .. offcourse other then reading this blog ..:)

Here you have two workarounds, depending on the you scenario:

1) Programmatically print the document using a MODI printer saving it as tiff. But this workaround has a big limitation of speed, it takes a long time printing the doc, specially if it has lots of images or lots of pages

2) This workaround is based on a default bookmark "\page" and EnhMetaFileBits property exposed in Word 2003 OM. Here is a partial .NET code that you can use.
 

 wdApp.ActiveDocument.Bookmarks("\page").Range.Select();
byte[] emfData = (byte[])wdApp.Selection.EnhMetaFileBits; 
System.IO.MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream(emfData); 
Metafile mf = new Metafile(ms); 

No, this is no perfect workaround this also has a couple of limitations, but i think this is a lesser of evils :)

(a) As this method selects the page and extracts the EnhMetaFileBits, if does not get the margins of the document.

(b) You can use this method only in Word 2003 and above

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 15, 2008
  Here is one of the question from one of you regarding the contents on Display Thumbnails For Every Page

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2009
  The Range.Select will not work if the document is protected.  A fix is to just use the EnhMetaFileBits property on the range. Word.Bookmark bm = doc.Bookmarks("page"); byte[] emfData = (byte[])bm.Range.EnhMetaFileBits; thanks a lot! didn't think of that eventuality