Generating PDF in .NET using XSL-FO

Question

I need to generate a pdf in .NET using XSL-FO. There are no shortage of libraries to do this. What library would you suggest that I use and why?

Answer 1

If you can use something different, you can try to use PdfSharp + MigraDoc.DocumentObjectModel libraries for .NET (see http://www.pdfsharp.net/). Both have MIT license and free to use in commercial projects.

You can install this libraries from one nuget package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/PDFsharp-MigraDoc/).

Then, you can define your PDF DOM with MigraDoc.DocumentObjectModel.Document class and print it with PdfDocumentRenderer class. Here is sample code:

using System;
using System.IO;
using MigraDoc.DocumentObjectModel;
using MigraDoc.Rendering;

namespace MigraDocTest
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var document = new Document();

            // initial page setup and declare the styles
            document.DefaultPageSetup.Orientation = Orientation.Landscape;

            var mainStyle = document.Styles[StyleNames.Normal];
            mainStyle.Font.Name = "Arial";

            const string TitleStyleName = "Title";

            var titleStyle = document.Styles.AddStyle(TitleStyleName, StyleNames.Normal);
            titleStyle.ParagraphFormat.Font.Size = 12;
            titleStyle.ParagraphFormat.SpaceAfter = "0";
            titleStyle.Font.Bold = true;

            // main page section setup
            var section = document.AddSection();
            section.PageSetup.PageFormat = PageFormat.A4;
            section.PageSetup.Orientation = Orientation.Landscape;
            section.PageSetup.LeftMargin = "15mm";
            section.PageSetup.RightMargin = "15mm";
            section.PageSetup.TopMargin = "12mm";
            section.PageSetup.BottomMargin = "20mm";

            // add content to DOM here
            section.AddParagraph("Hello, world!").Style = TitleStyleName;

            // actually print document to PDF
            var pdfRenderer = new PdfDocumentRenderer(unicode: true) { Document = document };
            pdfRenderer.RenderDocument();
            using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
            {
                pdfRenderer.Save(stream, closeStream: false);
                File.WriteAllBytes(@"_output.pdf", stream.ToArray());
            }
        }
    }
}

Note, that MigraDoc nuget supports .NET Framework 2+, .NETStandard is not supported. So, you need targeting to full .NET Framework to use this libraries.