C# PCL rendering into TIFF (or other image format)

Question

I'm looking for the best solution -- and perhaps the cheapest also -- to take PCL5e and PCL6 compliant code and render it into a TIFF image. Reliably.

Does anyone have any experience with the PCLTool SDK from PageTech (http://www.pagetech.com/pcl.php)? This looks to be the best I can find, but I'm not sure how flexible it really is.

The other options is trying to write my own interface, which would be a BEAST of a project and not one I really want to try to tackle.

Any open-source solutions out there? Anyone with a C#/.NET project having success with PCL rendering? If so, how?

Answer 1

Have used PageTech and it works well. I'd also suggest looking at http://www.lincolnco.com/ We've had very good success with this solution. It's a couple of libraries you can call from C# with ease and convert to PDF, from there a quick Ghostscript or other tool will produce the TIFF you need.

The problem is that PCL is nasty. Not the language but rather the fact that so much PCL breaks the rules. As such there are only a few engines that work well. PageTech and Lincoln are the only ones we've used that have had really good success.

We consider ourselves to be PCL experts and would NEVER tackle the project of builing our own parser.