.Net PDF Builder

Aswerty

I'm looking for the best way to generate a PDF using C# and .Net 4.0. The PDF will be one page long and have a small table, a few small images and a couple of bits of text in it. Everything except for the table data will be the exact same every time a PDF is generated. Also I'm not really in a position to pay so the tool will need to have a permisive license such as LGPL/MIT but not GPL since the application is closed source. Also the PDF will be accessed via a web page so a SaaS friendly licenese is a must. I have no problem with the technicalities of getting the PDF onto the clients computer once I know how to build one, it's a MVC application if that makes any difference.

I can't seem to find any Microsoft library or tool which meets my needs, all I seem to be bumping into is SSRS and other Wizard based report builders I can't seem to work out how to implement within my application or they require a reporting server to be used.

I came across PDFsharp and MigraDoc http://www.pdfsharp.net/ which looks promising, anyone know if it is any good?

Also what do you guys use yourself for your PDF building requirements?

Raging_Ninja

Nice shill bot

s7ryf3925pivug

I used that. My recollection is that you have to do it all procedurally which is a bit of a pain. I used a different tool as well but think it was a similar deal. I greatly prefer to use print CSS where suitable. If you're just trying to render stuff to print out then look into that.

Mr. CooL ICE

Have only ever used iTextSharp myself. It's a port from Java so the documentation can be a little frustrating. Also, it's not free for commercial use so that might be a factor for you.

Maybe it's my inexperience talking but I can't see how generating a PDF could be anything other than procedural?

John_Mc

Yeah I've used it. As others have said, you need to do it programmatically but it should be ok if the page is relatively simple and not likely to change that much over time.

s7ryf3925pivug

Dole Scrounging Vegan Crossfitter wrote: »

Have only ever used iTextSharp myself. It's a port from Java so the documentation can be a little frustrating. Also, it's not free for commercial use so that might be a factor for you.

Maybe it's my inexperience talking but I can't see how generating a PDF could be anything other than procedural?

Procedural in the sense you tell it to write this text, then move down this far, write that text etc. Compare that to declarative markup where you type the text and set attributes or styling saying where it will go. The latter is far less fiddly to work with.

Aswerty

This information would have been useful 6 years ago :pac:

Pretty sure I went with pdfsharp in the end.