I want to do below task using iText7.
create template using HTML or ..(some fields can be able to hide
according to user input)
Fill the template with the database data
generate accessible pdf
How can I do this?
As far as I understand, you want to have an HTML template where you will fill in data based on user input as well as data coming from your database. This is possible in iText in general, however you would need to do a lot of work, especially if you want to have a template for the PDFs that you are going to generate (as well as the template for the HTML form for capturing data).
It would be nice to have a tool where we design the HTML form and the form with which the output PDF is going to be generated interactively and maybe even using the same resources, sub-forms, sub-templates etc. Then the only thing the technical person would do is to bind the actual data to the form elements. The template will have the logic to show/hid elements or any other conditions that you might come up with. It would simplify the workflow a lot.
iText is working on a product called Dito which was announced in GIDS 2018 in Bangalore, India and a demo session was given. Dito is going to do exactly what you want and what I describe above. You can find the presentation here: http://www.developermarch.com/developersummit/downloadPDF/Dito.pdf
You can find also document workflow here: https://itextpdf.com/sites/default/files/attachments/LL_iText_Infographic_Flyer_A4-pdf.pdf
I'm comfortable generating Word documents using Aspose.Word (which can also save as a PDF) but I've recently been asked to do the same thing using a PDF as the starter template. We recently bought Aspose.Total and whilst Aspose.Pdf looks like it can do some manipulations it doesn't look to be all that flexible/easy (like adding a big line of text and getting it to wrap, and shifting other content down the page if it takes up more space).
What would be the best way of using a PDF as a template for what is basically a bit like a mail merge from a database? Should I turn it into a PDF form and merge it from an XML data source? Is this even viable or would such a form still have a limitation on spacing (so that longer lines/paragraphs of text won't reflow the document where necessary)?
From what I can tell it doesn't look like InDesign can be manipulated in c# even via a COM object (which would be nasty on a web server anyway).
If I recreated the InDesign/PDF as a Word document I'm sure I could work wonders, but you know what these publishing types are like, who think Word documents are the tool of the devil. These PDFs are never going to a professional printer anyway; they're just brochures for a client to download from a web page (based on information in a database) for printing/use at home.
You have indeed many solutions for such a web to print project. Choosing one is a matter of budget, requirements and users count. Placing dynamic contents can be done at the simpliest with PDF forms fillable with xml data.
On the other hand you can work with InDesign Server and output PDF based on InDesign templates. That's generally a good choice when a large amount of users needs to get rich pdf files in parallel. But the costs are heavy.
You can also envision A pitstop server or Callas PDFToolBox Server to place dynamic texts based on variables as supplied by you. The good point here is that you don't need much coding here. Those apps are ready to use.
You can at last consider command line tools. A few of them may have some useful commands such as pdfTk or cPdf to merge texts.
I'm trying to make my program have the ability to display a Microsoft Word file on a form but not having any luck in doing so. I want to be able to open the file and display it on the form as a Read-Only. So basically just display it's contents. Various users on the web have recommended displaying files in the WebBrowser control (under toolbox). I have tried this but failed to get it working. My end goal is to be able to annotate on top of the web browser (or something of similar manner) and subsequently save the annotations along with the opened file.
I'm not that experienced in the C# language too so any help on how to achieve my problem would be greatly appreciated.
You need a DOCX viewer control. My company recently gave away our multi-format WinForms viewer control as a free product - XtremeDocumentStudio .NET Free. It can display DOCX and is available on NuGet. It does not require a Web Browser control for embedding an online viewer or Word software installed locally.
http://www.nuget.org/packages/XtremeDocumentStudio.NETFree/
There are some good links that might help you.
First, you will find a closely related or similar question here
And in that conversation someone posted the following link which is about how to build a user control for displaying Word documents in a webbrowser control.
I also found another article here about how to integrate Excel in a Windows Form application using WebBrowser. But Excel is used as an example and you may be able to adapt it to Word.
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
On the server that my application is being run on, a virtual PDF printer is being installed (don't know much about this yet, except it's from Adobe), and my application needs to use this 'printer' to create PDF's from HTML pages (a GridView mostly), and then redirect the user to the URL of the where the PDF is stored.
I've been looking at the PrintDocument object in System.Drawing.Printing, however I've read that you can't simply feed this a HTML page. What are my choices? The easiest option would be to be able to 'print' a given HTML page (choosing what and what not to print using CSS), but from what I've read this is fairly difficult, so I'm thinking about somehow constructing whatever object PrintDocument needs programatically, if that makes sense.
Any ideas on how I should do this?
there are some free/cheap libs for creating pdfs on the fly. I've used itextsharp before and it worked pretty well. Takes a bit of time to get up to speed in how it works but I'd suggest checking it out.
There are also printing services like Neevia DocConverter that will monitor a folder and auto convert whatever you put in the folder to a pdf, jpg, etc. you can set it up so that if you drop a url shortcut in the folder it will render the webpage at that url to pdf. it's a bit more of a pain if you want to do realtime rendering but works excellent for generating mass reports in batches that you want to post up to a website or email later.