PdfSharp, GDI+ and HTML printing

Question

I currently have a "PrintingWebService" that I call from an AJAX page with all the information that is needed to construct a highly customized PDF printout using PDF Sharp and the PDFSharp's GDI+ mode, which takes DrawString and other commands that work basically just like GDI+ only they are drawn to the PDF.

I then save the PDF file to a location on the webserver and return the file name from the web service, and the AJAX page opens a new window with the pdf file.

So far, it works well, however, there is one part of my AJAX page that I want to printout and I haven't come up with a solution for yet. I've got a string of the HTML content of a TinyMCE editor that I want to dispay in the bottom part of the PDF page.

I'm looking for some sort of tool I could use for this purpose. Even something opensource that prints to GDI+ I could use by taking the source code and translating it to use PdfSharp's GDI+ (the class names are like XGraphics, with each class having X before the GDI+ name).

If I have to I will limit what HTML can be generated by TinyMCE and write my own renderer, but that will be a big challenge, so I'm looking for other solutions first.

I've stayed away from a printer-friendly page approach because I wanted to construct a page that was a near identical of an existing WinForms printout, using my existing code. With PdfSharp I was able to convert all the code except the text area stuff (which used the RichTextBox and RTF in the WinForms version).

Answer 1

Tony,

I personally have used WebSupergoo's ABCPdf library with much success. You can actually render HTML directly to the PDF and it does fairly well in regards to accuracy.

Another free software that will allow you the flexibility of writing HTML to PDF that I have used in the past with much success is iTextSharp.

Otherwise, I think you'll have to write something to render HTML to GDI.

Either way, you may want to consider using an HttpHandler that you map to using your web.config to generate the PDF file. This will allow for you to render the PDF to a bytestream and then dump it directly to the user (as opposed to having to save each PDF receipt to the web server). It will also allow for you to use the .pdf extension in the page that returns the receipt (PurchaseReceipt.pdf could be mapped to a HttpHandler)... making it more cross-browser friendly. Older versions of Adobe / Browsers will not display correctly if you start throwing a PDF byte stream from an ASPX page.

Hope this helps.