Best Library for Dynamic PDF or Word Doc Generation?

Question

Our ASP.NET application must be able to export web content to PDF and Word documents.

In the past, we've used Aspose's libraries to accomplish this, but we've found them to be a little too low-level in terms of document construction. e.g. We've found ourselves needing to write point-based functions using shape primitives to create bulleted lists.

Best case scenerio- we'd point a tool at our printable css-styled page and automagically get a PDF or Word document containing the same content styled in the same manner.

Have you had a good experience using any tools that could accomplish this?

Answer 1

I do not believe that they do the automagically but I have good luck with SyncFusions tool sets.

Answer 2

For dynamic PDF generation we used TallPDF.....worked pretty good.....

Answer 3

Check out pdfFactory Developer Kit.

I haven't used it myself, but the FinePrint tool from the same people was one of The Best tools for Windows (not using Windows or FinePrint any more).

Answer 4

ITextSharp is a pretty easy PDF tool to use with .Net (it's a port of the iText java project). Free, open source and pretty high level so this is the code for bullet points:

List overview = new List(false, 10); //false =unordered, true= numbered
overview.Add(new ListItem("This is an item"));
overview.Add("This is another item");

Doesn't do Microsoft Word though.

Answer 5

We're leaning towards PrinceXML for the PDF documentation creation, it seems to be a good fit with our desire to push XHTML/CSS into a PDF without additional document construction.

Answer 6

For generating Word files, I'd consider using the new OpenXML format. Microsoft provides good support for it, and it should be fairly easy to use. Sample article

Answer 7

We are using www.alt-soft.com Xml2PDF for this