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Simple Template Based PDF Reports in .Net

My customer gave me some Word and Powerpoint documents which specify how certain 'reports' generated by our product are supposed to look like.
That means, I need to modify those documents (replace placeholders etc.) and then I need to export them as PDF.
How would you solve this problem in C# ?
TL;DR: Editing the office document is no problem at all, but exporting that document to PDF (using Interop) allegedly causes issues when running it as a web server application. That's the whole problem here.

I agree that Interop is not suitable for document manipulation in server environment. I would approach this problem by preparing MS Word template documents with placeholders for data. Then I would use c# to load the data for the reports and merge the data with templates to get final documents (docx, pdf, xps or various image formats). There are 3rd party toolkits which make it quite easy. Here is the code used by one such toolkit needed for merging xml data with the template to get a pdf document:
XElement customers = XElement.Load("Customers.xml");
DocumentGenerator dg = new DocumentGenerator(customers);
DocumentGenerationResult result = dg.GenerateDocument("MyTemplate.docx", "MyReport.pdf");
You can of course also use free libraries and SDKs based on OpenXML but you should expect a steep learning curve, lots of debugging and lots of time invested.

Wkthmltopdf might be an option.

A completely different "report approach" could be, to save those office documents with the placeholders as mht (That's MHTML a web archive format). This could be done directly in MS Office or even programatically.
The placeholders could be easily exchanged by string search and replace. The mht files could directly be used to show the report instead of the PDF. A clear disadvantage of the mht format, is the HTML formatting. With PDF you have a clear and fix positioning.
We are using this kind of report creation. There are some flaws, but it works and the customer could edit the mht templates directly by right-click Open-With the prefered MS Office flavor.

You can use report generators, like FastReport.Net for solving your problems. It can assign different data for placeholders and also allow export to PDF.

Writing to a PDF with fields from SQL Server 2005

I'm running an asp.net 4 / c# site using SQL Server 2005 and want to write column values from within SQL Server into a PDF file which already has content inside it (I want to personalise a PDF voucher that you get from the logged in page on my site)
Is there an easy tutorial to look at or is this a much bigger job?

There are two parts here:
Read data from database (for example, using ADO.NET, Entity Framework, e.t.c.)
Write that data to a PDF document (using some free or commercial PDF tool, like iTextSharp, SharpPDF, XPDF, Docotic.Pdf, e.t.c)
You can look at this article that describes both parts in detail.

Well, I think you have several options out there.
For example, you can create a PDF document based on a template using iTextSharp.
In that case, the template is the existing voucher you mention. You'd have to replace the information inside it, by identifying the fields, or something like that.
Something similar could also be accomplished using PDFSharp.
Just pay special attention when using iTextSharp to its license agreement, since its AGPL, which means your software must be GPL/AGPL as well.
Now, if you want to avoid interacting with PDF objects, and APIs, you have one other alternative. Which is to create an RDLC local report, and directly export it to PDF from your codebehind. In this case, it wouldn't be based on an existing voucher, it would be created from scratch.

Generating PDF Report from database in C#, specifically ASP

I need to generate a high quality report based on information in a SQL Server database, and I want very explicit control of the layout and appearance from inside C#.
I have several choices that I know of that are already being used for various other reports at our company:
1) SQL Server's built in Reporting Services
2) Adobe Forms
3) Crystal Reports
This information I need as PDF directly parallels what is already being displayed in the user's web browser as HTML, so creating a print stylesheet and converting the browser body to PDF is an option as well.
So this creates option 4:
4) JavaScript convert HTML to PDF (my preference at this time)
Does anybody have a recommendation as to which approach I should take, or even better an alternative? All the choices seem pretty horrible.

I've used iTextSharp with very good results. It is an open-source .NET port of a java library. It works really well for creating PDFs from scratch. Remember that editing PDFs will always be hacky with any library, because PDF is an output format, not a read-write format.
Provided your HTML is fairly clean (remove javascript postbacks, anchors, ...),the iText HtmlWorker can convert HTML to PDF, if you prefer that route.
HTML to PDF in using iTextSharp:
Document doc = new Document(PageSize.A4);
HTMLWorker parser = new HTMLWorker(doc);
PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, Response.OutputStream);
Also here.

Use SSRS, it has a built in PDF rendering mode.

I have used two other PDF report libraries with great success; Active Reports and Telerik Reporting. Personally I prefer the latter when it comes to programmatic control of layout and such.

Take a look also at the DevExpress Reporting (non-free 3rd party tool):
Overview
Online Demos
Documentation

Yes, you should use the best tools to get the best solution. The best tool in this case probably is SSRS.
But that's just looking at the capabilities of the tool.
Don't forget to look at your own capabilities!
My story: I know SQL, I know C#. (Both intermediate, I'm not a guru.)
Then I lay my hands on SSRS. And burnt them, once, twice, etc.
At the end, there was a nice result. So burning your fingers is not a wrong thing to do.
But first try to pull your html through an html to pdf converter (demo version) and see if the result it serves your needs.
Currently I'm using both:
SSRS for creating invoices, because amounts have to be transported from one page to the next
Winnovative to generate documents that only need page numbers

I would suggest using .Net ReportViewer control in local mode (no report server required). It works in both webforms and winforms. You create a client-side report (.rdlc) file (which contains all the visuals as well as placement of data fields), link it up to the ReportViewer, and supply the data (DataTable or collection of objects, as long as the fields match, it doesn't matter). In client mode it supports exporting to pdf and excel (and Word too? don't remember). By default these done by a dropdown in the control itself however you can programmatically export to any of the supported formats as well. You'll end up with a byte array you can shove into a file stream.
Basically you get most of the good parts of SSRS without all of that backend complexity. There should be a ReportViewer folder in %programFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\ReportViewer - but versions exist for 2005 and 2008 as well. Check out http://gotreportviewer.com/

I think the 4th option is the best. In this case you don't need to change either layout of the HTML page or a layout of PDF, if one of them has been changed.
It is also more convenient making a nice design via HTML than programmatically via C# :)
Take a look at WebToPDF.NET which is a .NET component written in C# that converts HTML to PDF. The converter supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 including page breaks, forms and links. It passes all W3C tests (except BIDI).

You can use Fast Report it's good tool and i has a free version

What's the best way to generate a file and print it in .net?

I am working in a desktop project in C# with .net. This project has a function that generates some information and i would like to print this generated info as a document (may be .doc, .pdf, etc). Summarizing, i need:
Get the data generated by a function;
Generate a document containing these information structured with title, texts and tables (things that every document have);
Print it;
I thought generating an .html file (because it's simple to generate this kind of file), but i couldn't find a way to print it directly from my program.
Which extension of file would you recommend to insert this kind of information and print it directly from my program??
Thanks in advance.

Here's an easy way that uses a RichTextBox
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/printing/simpleprintingcs.aspx
It's not trivial to print a PDF, HTML, or a doc unless you are going to use external programs or third-party libraries. ImageMagick/GhostScript could help you print PDF.
Disclaimer: I work at Atalasoft -- If you are willing to use commercial software, my company makes PDF rendering components for .NET. There are companies that do the same for HTML.

Directly? Open printer port...
Or you can do it with framework classes:
How to: Print with a WebBrowser Control
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b0wes9a3.aspx

Generate PDF document based on Word document

I’d like in an ASP.NET MVC application generate document (invoice for example) based on a word document than I use as template. I create a word document with :
Some fix data :
Company info
Logo
general layout
Some data to add in a specific place :
Invoice number
A section with a table, with some column (price, quantity, description, vat, …)
In the bottom the total with and without VAT
A date
In this document, I can create a kind of tag, example <PDF:InvoiceNumber> and replace it by the value by code, same for all the other "TAG"
Do you have an idea how I can do this? Did you experiment another way (suggestions are welcome)? I accept to use 3rd control free or commercial. The only restriction is … I don’t want install Microsoft Word on the server.
Thanks,

Use the OSS .net port of iText, iTextSharp (google or bing for it).
General process:
1) Create a PDF file of your existing Word Doc
2) Using Acrobat (or similar tool) add PDF form fields to the file as placeholders for the data you will insert into the form at run-time
3) Using iTextSharp 's PDF form-filling API, insert the data into the form-fields in the PDF
4) Save, print, return-as-stream-to-client's-browser-with-PDF-mime-type, etc. the resulting PDF

I realise you don't want to install MS-Word on the server, but you could consider installing it on a separate machine and then consider the approach in this article. It uses Web Services and is clean and efficient.
I wrote this article so the usual disclaimers apply.