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.
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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 have a web app that displays the profile of over 600 people, and each profile displays a word cloud. the word cloud is rendered using html.
The client has requested that the same word cloud to appear in an excel macro that pretty much does the same thing as the web app.
I have seen a few solutions that saves image from rendered page but is there a way to create images from the html programatically, without selecting each of the 600 profiles manually.
Since rendering html is a browser's job, you could take a look at doing it by javascript.
Write a nice little program in jQuery (or your favorite js framework) that renders the word cloud of every profile on a canvas, and then use this:
http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/canvas2image/
to take an image of the rendered html.
I know it has been a while since I asked this question but I'll answer it for the benefit of others. I ended up using something called IECapt to capture rendering of a web page into a BMP, JPEG or PNG image file;
http://iecapt.sourceforge.net/
I then wrote a unit test to iterate over the various urls, passing it as an argument to the IECapt utility. Was able to render over 600 images in a few seconds.
This question has been asked several times but my situation is a little different.
I have a web application written in C# where I get a string value passed to this page I'm working on. This string value represents a filename of a PDF file I need to display on this page. I'm supposed to have a left panel where I have some information displayed, and a right panel showing the contents of a PDF file. I'm using a simple table here to separate the panels. All PCs should already have Acrobat Reader installed.
My question is simple. How can I display the contents of the PDF file within this table? I don't need anything fancy. It has to be free and simple enough for a newbie like me to set up. It could even be written in jQuery/AJAX, if there even is a way.
I've looked at a Webbrowser control within an ASP.NET page, but it looks way too complicated for a simple viewer. I looked at Webparts, but I'm not sure if that's doable in a non-Sharepoint environment. Suggestions?
Have you tried the object tag? More ideas are here Make PDF display inline instead of separate Acrobat Reader window
I am trying to implement a feature where i open (suppose in iframe) a PDF file (multiple pages), Highlight a section of the document a get the page number (the one that is displayed in the PDF tool bar).
Eg: if the toolbar display 2/7 which means i am right now in page 2, i need to capture the page number information. Sounds simple but i am not able to get a .dll/function that exposes this property.
Any help would be grateful.Thanks.
I wouldn't think this would be possible, there's no way to control PDFs with JavaScript in the browser, which is what you'd need to do.
This article suggests the same: http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=43436.
Content of link:
in short, no, you can't do that.
really don't think JS can read properties of PDFs, since PDFs are viewed in the browser thru a plugin, ie a viewport for another application (for want of a better explanation).
You may be better trying a different route, such as generating the pages as images and implementing your own paging. Depends on your content and requirements, of course. ABCPDF from http://www.websupergoo.com/ is free (with a link-back), not sure if that's any help for you.
Well, heres my scenario.
Client/Server winforms application with SQL Express as the DB. I need to be able to print invoice, packing slips etc..
i would like the customer to be able to modify the invoices. ie. be able to put their logo or change font sizes etc...basically format the display.
Things i have considered so far are.
1) Use a template engine (similar to codesmith or mygeneration) and use templates that output HTML. Then print the html page.
2) Use ReportViewer in local mode. I've heard that users can download a plugin for web dev express and edit the local report files. can anyone confirm this?
3) Use Reportviewer in remote mode.
I don't have much experience with ReportViewer so I'm not sure if i should use local or remote mode as well.
Those of you that have done this kind of thing before whats your recommendation?
After just completing a project with it, I would heartily recommend iTextSharp to create your invoices and other forms as PDFs. In addition to creating PDFs from scratch, you can also use it to fill in PDF forms and/or templates created with Acrobat (or even MS Office/OpenOffice). And it's free.
It's pretty easy to use in Windows apps or in ASP.Net applications. Most of the documentation and the books on it (iText in Action, for example) are about the original Java version, iText. However, there are tutorials and example code on the conversion process and, for the most part, all of the functions and libraries work the same in the .Net version, so adapting the book and reference code has been no problem.
I definitely learned the hard way that HTML and CSS are great for browsers (well, great except for the "every browser interprets it different" problem), but horrible for trying to generate consistent, attractive, and precise printed output and forms.
I'm personally using Aspose Words: they use word documents as templates, and I'm using Words bookmarks function to mark and retrieve the fields I need to fill.
Aspose works nicely with Tables (ie: you can add lines to a table, etc...) and sees Word documents as XML documents. You can then save the document as MSWord or PDF.
I wouldn't say it's the greatest library in the world, but it's definitely worth having a look :)
you can use Crystal Report for this. But first you need to scan the INVOICE and save it as an image,
Next is, on your crystal report, export the image on to it, and DRAG the fields to where they must print on the invoice (IMAGE SERVES AS YOUR GUIDE). Then after everything has been set-up, DELETE THE IMAGE and try it.
hope this helps.