Recommended .NET PDF Renderer for multiple pages with form fields

Question

We currently use TallComponents PDFKit.Net for rendering tedious state documents that have a number of form fields. Often we'll need to have a page that repeats many times within a single document. Most reports are 10 pages, with 3 unique template pages (pre formatted in Adobe), for example. We've worked with TallComponents to optimize for mutlipage rendering to take advantage of document flattening and the similarity of page definitions for repeatable pages. The particular optimization is difficult to work with (read: hacky) and is encapsulated within a MulitPageRendering class. But, now we have a new requirement that all fields must be editable (ie not flattened) and TallComponents is a beast for this stuff. Memory runs rampant, the document size explodes, and the process takes much longer. Were talking orders of magnitude on all 3 listed. We've looked at other pdf tools for our expensive merging process (PDFTron, ExpertPDF, AbcPdf), but I was wondering if people perform similar merging operations with a tool they've been satisfied with. I'm currently playing around with iTextSharp, but there are a ton out there.

Answer 1

Can you not just use a reporting tool to generate the report you require? These are made specfically for formatting data?

We use Active Reports from http://www.datadynamics.com/default.aspx and can highly recommend it.

Answer 2

I've used iTextSharp. It's really low level, and has some quirkiness when it comes to page breaks, etc, but overall it works pretty well. I couldn't find anything else that had the low level capabilities we needed (we were doing some ridiculous reporting), so we didn't have much of a choice.