Display pdf pages in Max sequentially

roger.carruthers's icon

I need to display the pages of a pdf within a Max app, such that the user can scroll through the pages sequentially, which means that the pages must sort correctly.

As I understand it, there is no way to display an actual pdf in say fpic or a jit.pwindow - please correct me if I'm wrong . Jit.movie appears to be able to read a pdf, but I get no output in a pwindow.

So, I could convert the pdf to a .mov first using QT 7 Pro, but a) the user may not have QT 7 Pro, and b) it turns a 20mb file into a 2Gb file, so not a great solution.

My current solution is to use an Automator script which splits the pdf into individual pages and converts them to jpgs, which I can then display in an fpic, and this works fine but...
The problem with this is that the Automator script doesn't insert leading zeros, so the pages don't sort correctly, which means I need to ask the user to insert the leading zeros manually - which is fine if the pdf is under 99 pages, as you only have to do it for pages 1-9, but for pdf's of 100 pages or more, it's asking a bit much!
I'm not very familiar with Automator, but afaict, you can't edit the Actions, and the page numbering bit is contained within the SplitPDF Action, so I'm stuck with no leading zeros.

Any ideas? Ideally, I'm looking for something that will not be asking the user to jump through too many hoops...

Source Audio's icon

A bit late to this thread.
Are You on Mac ?
Here is option using movie object to load PDF,
detect size, adjust movie screen, count pages
for scrolling / selecting a page.
It works on max 6 or 7.3.6.
I have used it so far only on 10.6.8 ...
uses shell object to gather pdf infos

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.