Is it possible to embed and view PDFs or Word Documents in a GUI, either created using GUIDE or otherwise?

I have a GUIDE-created GUI that I would like to display results, which are in Word Document form, directly inside the GUI. Is this possible in R2017b?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

One option is to open a web browser to display the file:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/web.html

If I understand correctly this would have to be a separate window.

On Windows, another option would be to use Activex to talk to Word to tell it to display the document. I think this would need to be a different window.

A third approach is to arrange to have the document print to image and read the image and display it. This could be part of a window but it would not have any controls that you would normally see in a viewer.

Finally, there is the possibility that that you might be able to do this by calling on Java. Uipanel should create a Java canvas I think, and you could potentially tell an appropriate Java routine to render into that canvas. I would recommend looking at undocumentedmatlab.com for more about the lower level interface to Java.

[Terence Ng]

Thanks for the advice Walter. I'll start looking through and hopefully it'll be what I'm thinking.

I'll just go with opening up a separate window if the result doesn't turn out the way I was envisioning it.

Answer 2

[Eddy Fry]

I have just tried displaying a PDF file with a uihtml panel in a uifigure and it displayed nicely.

The app code to point to the pdf file looks like this:

app.HTML.HTMLSource = 'my_pdf_file.pdf';

The normal PDF zoom controls work, which is a bonus.

Hope this helps.

[Duncan Carlsmith]

Can you provide the code for this?