Multi display Applet

[Sharon whipple]

Hi all.
In our organization we use the browser to display files to user's e.g pdf doc jpg bmp tif etc,
But not always the user browser is configured properly and some of the files won't open.
Is there any free / open source applet that will know how to handle and display common files like DOC / PDF / JPG ?

Thank you
Sharon whipple

[Ulf Dittmer]

Applets won't help with this. If the browser doesn't know what to do with a particular document, generally a dialog is opened that asks the user whether a) the document should be stored to disk, or b) if it should be opened with a particular program of the users choosing. What would you rather have happen?

[Sharon whipple]

hi Ulf
I'm assuming related software is registered for X type of file (word for doc, acrobat for pdf , mspaint for BMP , etc)
What I'm trying to achieve Is that the applet will "host" the registered software and will display it in the browser .

Thank you
Sharon

[Ulf Dittmer]

Now I'm confused. What do you mean by an applet hosting an application? I'm guessing that what you're trying to achieve will be easiest without an applet, or, actually, will not benefit at all from an applet, but I'm not sure since I don't understand what exactly the problem is. Can you elaborate?

[Sharon whipple]

I will start with a modest request
What i need applet (free / OS) that will know to show common image files e.g TIFF / TIF / JPEG / BMP / PNG / GIF / BMP ...

the problem is that IE dont know how to display TIF / png.

thank you very much
Sharon whipple

[Ulf Dittmer]

I think the formats you mention are all supported by the ImageIO package (javax.imageio), so you can use that to load the images and then display them using Java2D.

[Sharon whipple]

Besides doc and pdf , the main image type i want to display is TIFF / TIF
Supported types by ImageIO are :

reader BMP
reader bmp
reader jpeg
reader wbmp
reader gif
reader png
reader JPG
reader jpg
reader WBMP
reader JPEG

writer BMP
writer bmp
writer jpeg
writer wbmp
writer png
writer JPG
writer PNG
writer jpg
writer WBMP
writer JPEG

Is there any other option ?

[Ulf Dittmer]

I'm fairly certain that the image formats are all supported in the way I described earlier. DOC and PDF are entirely different propositions. For PDF, you can use the Acrobat Viewer Bean described here. I'm not aware of any Java package -commercial or otherwise- that can display DOC files. On the other hand, configuring the browser to deal with these formats correctly doesn't seem that hard - any chance of enlightening your users?