Generation PDF from HTML (component for .NET) [closed]

Answer 1

Abcpdf .Net version 8 works but it creates lot of issue in production servers where security and user rights are restrictive.

It is difficult to directly to do URL->pdf conversion. We ended up URL-Save HTML in local folder ->read HTML and convert to PDF-> delete HTML file from folder - tricky approach but it works. The only flaw is that you need to give read/write permission on a folder on server. Its still better than decreasing security settings.

Answer 2

Using the (commercial) Aspose.Pdf since years successfully. Works both for .NET and Java.

Answer 3

Here is HTML to PDF .NET component at the reasonable price. But it has own html/css reading and pdf rendering engines.

Answer 4

We've had a lot of success with an open source product called 'itextsharp' - it's not so hot at the HTML-to-PDF but is good for carefully piecing together a specific PDF document (such as a receipt). It's also free, which is always a bonus. See:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/

Another quick and lightweight solution is XMLPdf, written by a software company called Ibex from New Zealand no less. This tool has a model where you create an XML template file, with HTML-ish tags in the schema. You can also define tags in the XML which you associate with objects in your .NET code behind. Kind of clunky, but useful in particular circumstances. Not free, but cheap. Can find it by searching for XMLpdf on Google.

Answer 5

One alternative solution would be to use the web browser control and print the html to an installed PDF printer.
There are several free PDF printers available and they can be set up to print directly to a file without displaying a user interface.

I used a solution like this once and it worked fine even for large documents and large numbers of documents.

Answer 6

By nature of the task (HTML to PDF conversion) pretty looking PDF generation tool should able to render HTML like web-browser. Fortunately it is already exists: WkHtmlToPdf open source project but it doesn't provide any integration with .NET from the box.

Don't spend your time on reinventing the wheel: I've already packed WkHtmlToPdf into one DLL (no external dependencies at all), just add it to your project and generate PDF with one line of code:

var pdfBytes = (new NReco.HtmlToPdfConverter()).GeneratePdf(htmlContent); 

Additionally, it's possible to specify various options (like margins, zoom-factor etc) through HtmlToPdfConverter's properties.

DLL can be downloaded here (it's FREE): PdfGenerator for .NET