We are looking at creating a custom PDF document for users using C#. The windows app will ask certain questions to the user. Based on the questionnaire responses certain sections are removed / added. The PDF will be in a 2 column layout with fair amount of graphics etc.
What is the best solution to create this PDF based on user responses to the questionnaire?
Thanks.
Have you checked out the various open-source libraries for C# to generate PDFs? There are a number of them out there.
ActiveReports has an export-to-PDF option for its reports. This option would let you work with a sophisticated report designer (open-source libraries may have this too, though). It is kind of expensive (especially compared to free).
We use Adlib Express in-house. It does conversion, publishing and OCR.
Two good products for pdf creatation in C# are itextsharp (http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net) and pdfsharp (http://www.pdfsharp.net/) I think both will do what you are trying to do. Both have a lot of samples.
For a commercial product activePDF is a very feature rich pdf toolkit editor/generator.
There are many choices of toolkit for this requirement. Given that the document has a dual column layout and is graphics-intensive (sounds like some kind of marketing collateral?), I'd definitely recommend testing a couple of solutions and see which ones work best. Multi-column layouts are sometimes tricky to capture faithfully after conversion. In general printer driver based conversion tools will produce the most accurate output for tricky documents. Some popular printer driver based tools that support this requirement include: EasyPDF SDK from pdfonline.com (I'm on the engineering team for this so consider me appropriately biased here), ActivePDF, and Adobe's first party tools such as LiveCycle. Good luck!
You could create a WPF flow document. Then you are really flexible creating a layout, especially concerning variable contents. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163371.aspx for an overview. These documents can easily be saved as xps (pdf-like format), maybe that is already an option. If not, there are special printer drivers or tools like PDF Creator that will create a pdf from your flow document.
Hello,
I am working for a company called ceTe Software and we have a product for generating PDF documents which can create PDF documents programmatically from scratch or merge existing PDF documents. You can also add new data to an existing PDF document and you can read/fill the form fields. Our products are designed keeping the performance in mind. There is no limitation on the size of the PDF document or the number of pages a PDF can have. But make sure that the system has sufficient resources to generate huge PDF documents.
You can add/delete the pages from a PDF document and you can merge several PDF documents depending on the user selection. You can also add data to the PDF depending on the user selection.
You can use the DynamicPDF for .NET product for this and you can download the fully functional evaluation version from our website. You will get sample examples and a help documentation along with the product download. You can refer them for help, you can also contact our support team at [email protected] for any technical queries.
We offer our products in two licensing models, server based licensing and developer based licensing. You can choose one model depending on your requirement. You can contact us ([email protected]) for more details on licensing.
If you want to convert web pages into PDF documents then you can do this using our DynamicPDF Converter for .NET product. You can convert around 62 file types into PDF documents. You can refer to our help documentation for more details. You can download this evaluation product also from our website.
Please feel free to visit our website at http://www.cete.com and download the evaluation version products from the .NET section.
Thanks,
Ranganadh,
ceTe Software Support Team.