tkDocViewer 2.0.1

Document viewer widget for Tkinter (discontinued!)

tkDocViewer is an inefficient, yet practical, Tkinter widget for displaying file previews.

It supports a variety of document and image formats; see below for the complete list. Support for new formats can be added through a modular backend system.

Both Python 2 and 3 are supported, on Windows and Unix platforms.

Development Status

tkDocViewer is discontinued. I will no longer be issuing updates or providing technical support.

I created tkDocViewer to fill a particular need using the tools I had available at the time. It did the job, but was never an elegant solution. Its design suffers from poor accessibility, high resource consumption, and limited support for advanced file-format features. For example, tkDocViewer displays PDF files simply by rendering each page as a bitmap image. This uses huge amounts of memory and processor time, and prevents tkDocViewer from supporting useful features like find-in-page, since it does not actually process textual content in PDF files as text.

Given its design limitations, and given that I no longer need it for my own projects, I have decided to discontinue development of tkDocViewer. The code will remain available on GitHub, since others may still find value in it. However, I will no longer be issuing updates or providing technical support.

If you are starting a new project where PDF support is important, I strongly encourage you to consider a more modern toolkit like GTK, Qt, or wxWidgets. These toolkits offer far more robust viewer widgets with greater accessibility, lower resource consumption, and more extensive file-format support than tkDocViewer can provide.

If you are still using tkDocViewer in an existing project, please note that users have reported PDF rendering problems with Ghostscript 9.5x releases. For more information, please see issue #1 on GitHub. Downgrading to Ghostscript 9.27 may help as a short-term workaround.

Usage

tkDocViewer consists of a single module, tkdocviewer (note the module name is lowercase), which exports a single class, DocViewer.

A brief example program:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from tkinter import *
from tkdocviewer import *

# Create a root window
root = Tk()

# Create a DocViewer widget
v = DocViewer(root)
v.pack(side="top", expand=1, fill="both")

# Display some document
v.display_file("example.pdf")

# Start Tk's event loop
root.mainloop()

For detailed documentation, try python3 -m pydoc tkdocviewer.

Supported Formats

Note: Most file formats require third-party modules or external applications to be present at runtime. tkDocViewer will still work without them, but file format support will be limited by what's available on your system.

Document Formats

Format	Extensions	Requirements	Notes
PDF	.pdf	Ghostscript
Plain text	.txt	none
Postscript	.ps	Ghostscript
XPS	.xps	Ghostscript, GhostXPS	OpenXPS has not been tested.

Image Formats

Format	Extensions	Requirements	Notes
Bitmap image	.bmp, .pcx	Pillow
GIF	.gif	Pillow	Animations are displayed as individual frames.
JPEG	.jpe, .jpg, .jpeg	Pillow
PNG	.png	Pillow
Netpbm	.pbm, .pgm, .pnm, .ppm	Pillow
Targa	.tga	Pillow
TIFF	.tif, .tiff	Pillow	Supports multi-page documents.
Windows icon	.ico	Pillow
X bitmap	.xbm	Pillow