Porting pat2Pdf to C# - Tiff Library? PDF Conversion?

Question

I'm looking to port Oren Tirosh and Thomas Boege's excellent patent2pdf script (http://www.tothink.com/pat2pdf/pat2pdf) into a few languages, the first one being C#, so that it can more easily utilize it in my school research and so I can use it if I build other applications.

The script requires an http fetcher and some libraries to manipulate TIFFs.

I think I am familiar enough with the C# libraries to handle the http fetching aspect of things, however, the I'm not sure about how to best convert the TIFF files to PDFs. This SO question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/336466/free-tool-or-library-to-convert-tiff-files-to-pdf-in-net) suggests using PDFSharp or iTextSharp. Has anyone had any experience with those libraries? Are there other recommendations?

Answer 1

I've used iTextSharp to generate PDFs but not to convert TIFF to PDF. However for generating PDF files from C# code I've found it to be very useful and fairly easy to use. It has the added benefit of being well known in the .NET community.

I guess your best bet is find some candidates via a Google session, shortlist a few and try them out. It wouldn't be too hard to abstract out the conversion component so you could quickly change the converter at a later date.

Answer 2

I made some investigation about tiff to pdf conversion, and the fastest and easiest API I found was abcpdf.

It's not free but because I have a lot of conversions and its critical for the business, it is a good choice.

Itextsharp is a good option also, but its slow. I made some tests and I had performance metrics. Unfortunately I just can't find them. Sorry...

Answer 3

hi - I recently completed a similar project and used PDFSharp for my needs. This is an excellent library and you'll find using this very intuitive. You can get started from the below location: http://pdfsharp.codeplex.com/