Our platform offers presenters the ability to upload their presentations into a web based dashboard, as PowerPoint or PDF documents.
Our backend then handles the conversion of those documents to lightweight images that can then be shared to audience devices as presenters are live on stage, even under poor Wi-Fi of cellular conditions.
On the back end of our platform, we’ve spent a lot of time fine-tuning to optimise the conversion of documents, both to convert documents accurately, but also to do it in a timely manner. Speed is important: users become frustrated if they have to wait for simple tasks to complete, so this process has to be time efficient.
The Aspose Solution
We initially chose to go down the open source route to perform document conversion, and while it has been sufficient and satisfactory enough at our MVP stage, we noticed over time user numbers increased significantly, affecting performance. Also, the way in which many of the documents are designed pushed the boundaries of our open source rendering solution. We needed a better solution.
The search for a library that would satisfy our needs was started and we soon found Aspose. The move to Aspose (in this case Aspose.PDF) felt easy and we’ve been entirely satisfied so far with their level of service.
Rapid prototyping using their free trial license quickly confirmed that their library was more than capable to handle the variety of content that our platform needs to service. Our compatibility and performance constraints were met.
A Quick Glance
Integrating with Aspose couldn’t be more simple. If you are developing in .NET for example, packages can easily be found and installed via NuGet. Simply reference them in your relevant classes:
You can then follow along their examples, in this case here we’re opening a given PDF, iterating over its pages and generating a JPEG image for each page
And voila.
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