Best PDF 3rd party toolkit

Question

Hey anyone know the best pdf toolkit for the following requirements;

• Need to be able to convert HTML to PDF (including stylesheet)
• Build up PDF ie, add text add checkbox etc etc
• Needs to be able to run asp.net context
• Needs to be able to run in desktop context

I know there appears to be loads out there but just thought someone could recommend one they have had success with.

Cheers

Answer 1

1-on-1 translation from HTML to PDF can be a bit dodgy... At best. What I've used in the past was ABCPDF bij Websupergoo.

Answer 2

Have a look at PDFSharp for .Net

www.pdfsharp.com/

Free .NET PDF Creation Software Toolkit. PDFsharp is a .NET library for creating and modifying Adobe PDF documents programmatically. It is written in C# and can be used from any .NET language like VB.NET.

Answer 3

Are you familiar with iTextSharp? I used the Java version as well as the .NET port. Both did the job for me, especially with streaming PDF-generation with high volumes of data.

Answer 4

PDFSharp has some limitations, it cannot open some documents due to the new iStream (I think) objects in the later versions of the PDF specification. We migrated from it to avoid these issues and went to PDFTron (which is a paid for product). You may not run into this as you don't seem to be parsing documents, only creating them.

I don't have a sample or a specific example as we've moved on from it, but I recommend you try itextsharp as recommended by stokey, it is more actively developed and free.

Ryan