I've got a two part question about using iTextSharp. I've built a simple MVC application to store information about "lessons learned" in a SQL Server database. When a user is looking at the details for a lesson I want them to be able to save the lesson as a PDF. I've got some working code but 1) I'm not sure how sound my approach is and 2) the MVC application uses a TinyMCE rich text editor and when I put the rich text into the PDF the html tags are being displayed. How do I get the PDF to honor the html formatting (bold fonts, unordered lists, paragraphs, etc.)?
Below is the code I'm using to generate the PDF. I would really appreciate feedback if I'm going about this incorrectly.
Thanks.
public FilePathResult GetPDF(int id)
{
Lesson lesson = lessonRepository.GetLesson(id);
string pdf = #"C:\Projects\Forms\LessonsLearned\PDF\template_test.pdf";
string outputFilePath = #"C:\Temp\pdf_output\test_template_filled.pdf";
PdfReader pdfReader = null;
try
{
pdfReader = new PdfReader(pdf);
using (FileStream pdfOutputFile = new FileStream(outputFilePath, FileMode.Create))
{
PdfStamper pdfStamper = null;
try
{
pdfStamper = new PdfStamper(pdfReader, pdfOutputFile);
AcroFields acroFields = pdfStamper.AcroFields;
acroFields.SetField("title", lesson.Title);
acroFields.SetField("owner", lesson.Staff.FullName);
acroFields.SetField("date", lesson.DateEntered.ToShortDateString());
// field with rich text
acroFields.SetField("situation", Server.HtmlDecode(lesson.Situation));
acroFields.SetField("description", Server.HtmlDecode(lesson.Description));
pdfStamper.FormFlattening = true;
}
finally
{
if (pdfStamper != null)
{
pdfStamper.Close();
}
}
}
}
finally
{
pdfReader.Close();
}
return File(outputFilePath, "application/pdf", "Lesson_" + lesson.ID + ".pdf");
}
The only major component of your approach I'd change is how the data is returned. Right now you are using a fixed file path, which means that two people making requests at the same time will result in one of them getting an error. Since you are not saving the file for later use, I would skip the FileStream entirely and use a MemoryStream. You can then use FileStreamResult to return the stream with a MIME type of application/pdf.
For the second part you will have some trouble. PDF and HTML are not related, so HTML tags (which are just plain text) have no special meaning in a PDF document. If you want to convert a users HTML (generated by your rich text control) into suitable PDF rich text you will need an HTML parser in the middle.
iText includes the HTMLWorker class, which is a partial HTML parser (meaning it won't handle all html tags or structures) designed to return PDF compatible chunks. You could also use something like the HTMLAgilityPack to have more control over which tags are converted, but you'd then have to do the translation yourself. You could also examine your rich edit control, to see if it can return rich text in an easier to parse format.
Related
I use a Office Word file (template) and in this file there is repetitive default text and photo that I have to replace it by another photo and text
How can I define specific zone in the template and then find those zones in C# to replace them ?
I think the best way is to find out how to manipulate the word xml structure to include the data you want.
For template filling and altering you can use the XML SDK from Microsoft
You can also follow this manual approach here without using the SDK.
Manual approach. You will add a custom XML Ressource that includes your changes/ressources for the template.
If you don`t need to be that flexible you can use the standard content control / picture content control in Word and replace them afterwards in C# - it depends how flexible you want to be in replacing elements..
You can find a good and complete example of using picture content control here: Picture content control handling
Ok, finally I try this approch ; use a Word file with Content Control and use a XML file to bind data to them
For that I use the following code :
string outFile = #"D:\template_created.docx";
string docPath = #"D:\template.docx";
string xmlPath = #"D:\template.xml";
File.Copy(docPath, outFile);
using (WordprocessingDocument doc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(outFile, true))
{
MainDocumentPart mdp = doc.MainDocumentPart;
if (mdp.CustomXmlParts != null)
{
mdp.DeleteParts<CustomXmlPart>(mdp.CustomXmlParts);
}
CustomXmlPart cxp = mdp.AddCustomXmlPart(CustomXmlPartType.CustomXml);
FileStream fs = null;
try
{
fs = new FileStream(xmlPath, FileMode.Open);
cxp.FeedData(fs);
mdp.Document.Save();
}
finally
{
if (fs != null)
{
fs.Dispose();
}
}
}
When I run the app, it created the custom XML file and append it to my Word file. When I open the Word file, there is no error, but all the Content Control are not filled
My final approach was to use Content Control in my Word document with a unique id. Then I can find those id's with C# and replace the content.
I know there are lot of question having same title but I am currently having some issue for them I didn't get the correct way to go.
I am using Open xml sdk 2.5 along with Power tool to convert .docx file to .html file which uses HtmlConverter class for conversion.
I am successfully able to convert the docx file into the Html file but the problem is, html file doesn't retain the original formatting of the document file. eg. Font-size,color,underline,bold etc doesn't reflect into the html file.
Here is my existing code:
public void ConvertDocxToHtml(string fileName)
{
byte[] byteArray = File.ReadAllBytes(fileName);
using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
memoryStream.Write(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);
using (WordprocessingDocument doc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(memoryStream, true))
{
HtmlConverterSettings settings = new HtmlConverterSettings()
{
PageTitle = "My Page Title"
};
XElement html = HtmlConverter.ConvertToHtml(doc, settings);
File.WriteAllText(#"E:\Test.html", html.ToStringNewLineOnAttributes());
}
}
}
So I just want to know if is there any way by which I can retain the formatting in converted HTML file.
I know about some third party APIs which does the same thing. But I would prefer if there any way using open xml or any other open source to do this.
PowerTools for Open XML just released a new HtmlConverter module. It now contains an open source, free implementation of a conversion from DOCX to HTML formatted with CSS. The module HtmlConverter.cs supports all paragraph, character, and table styles, fonts and text formatting, numbered and bulleted lists, images, and more. See https://openxmldeveloper.org/
Your end result will not look exactly the way your Word Document turns out, but this link might help.
You might want to find an external tool to help you do this, like Aspose Words
You can use OpenXML Viewer extension for Firefox for Converting with formatting.
http://openxmlviewer.codeplex.com
This works for me. Hope this helps.
I am looking for a way to merge the content of two pdf pages.
It could be a watermark, an image or whatever.
The scenario is as follows:
I have a Word-addin that allows the user to create different templates for different customers based on several template forms. For each new customer, the user can provide a new letter paper containing header image / logos and footer. This shall be applied anyhow at runtime. Could be an image that is loaded directly into the header of the template (then I would need to render pdf to image, for the letter paper will mostly be provided as pdf-file) or when exporting the document (merging letter paper as background).
But the template shall not be accessible by the user, so this must be done programmatically.
So far, I tried Pdfsharp library, which does not support neither the version of my provided backpapers, nor the version of my documents created in Word 2007.
iTextSharp seemed very promising, but I could not manage to merge the contents so far.
I also tried pdftk.exe, but even when i ran it manually from command line, I got the error: "Done. Input errors, so no output created."
It does not matter how it is handled, but the output matters.
I forgot to mention, there is a whiteline created in the Word-template for archiving purposes, so this part may not be added as image or it has to be added afterwords into the output document.
Thanks in advance!
StampStationery.cs, a sample from the Webified iTextSharp Examples which essentially are the C#/iTextSharp versions of the Java/iText samples from the book iText in Action — 2nd Edition, does show how to add the contents of a page from one PDF document as stationery behind the content of each page of another PDF.
The central method is this:
public byte[] ManipulatePdf(byte[] src, byte[] stationery)
{
// Create readers
PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(src);
PdfReader s_reader = new PdfReader(stationery);
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
// Create the stamper
using (PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, ms))
{
// Add the stationery to each page
PdfImportedPage page = stamper.GetImportedPage(s_reader, 1);
int n = reader.NumberOfPages;
PdfContentByte background;
for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++)
{
background = stamper.GetUnderContent(i);
background.AddTemplate(page, 0, 0);
}
}
return ms.ToArray();
}
}
This method returns the manipulated PDF as a byte[].
Input are Excel files - the cells may contain some basic HTML formatting like <b>, <br>, <h2>.
I want to read the strings and insert the text as formatted text into word documents, i.e. <b>Foo</b> would be shown as a bold string in Word.
I don't know which tags are used so I need a "generic solution", a find/replace approach does not work for me.
I found a solution from January 2011 using the WebBrowser component. So the HTML is converted to RTF and the RTF is inserted into Word. I was wondering if there is a better solution today.
Using a commercial component is fine for me.
Update
I came across Matthew Manela's MarkupConverter class. It converts HTML to RTF. Then I use the clipboard to insert the snippet into the word file
// rtf contains the converted html string using MarkupConverter
Clipboard.SetText(rtf, TextDataFormat.Rtf);
// objTable is a table in my word file
objTable.Cell(1, 1).Range.Paste();
This works, but will copy/pasting up to a few thousand strings using the clipboard break anything?
You will need the OpenXML SDK in order to work with OpenXML. It can be quite tricky getting into, but it is very powerful, and a whole lot more stable and reliable than Office Automation or Interop.
The following will open a document, create an AltChunk part, add the HTML to it, and embed it into the document. For a broader overview of AltChunk see Eric White's blog
using (var wordDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open("DocumentName.docx", true))
{
var altChunkId = "AltChunkId1";
var mainPart = wordDoc.MainDocumentPart;
var chunk = mainPart.AddAlternativeFormatImportPart(AlternativeFormatImportPartType.Html, altChunkId);
using (var textStream = new MemoryStream())
{
var html = "<html><body>...</body></html>";
var data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(html);
textStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
textStream.Position = 0;
chunk.FeedData(textStream);
}
var altChunk = new AltChunk();
altChunk.Id = altChunkId;
mainPart.Document.Body.InsertAt(altChunk, 0);
mainPart.Document.Save();
}
Obviously for your case, you will want to find (or build) the table you want and insert the AltChunk there instead of at the first position in the body. Note that the HTML that you insert into the word doc must be full HTML documents, with an <html> tag. I'm not sure if <body> is required, but it doesn't hurt. If you just have HTML formatted text, simply wrap the text in these tags and insert into the doc.
It seems that you will need to use Office Automation/Interop to get the table heights. See this answer which says that the OpenXML SDK does not update the heights, only Word does.
Use this code it is working..
Response.AppendHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=FileEName.xls");
Response.Charset = "";
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
this.EnableViewState = false;
//Response.Write("Your HTML Code");
Response.Write("<table border='1 px solid'><tr><th>sfsd</th><th>sfsdfssd</th></tr><tr>
<td>ssfsdf</td><td><table border='1 px solid'><tr><th>sdf</th><th>hhsdf</th></tr><tr>
<td>sdfds</td><td>sdhjhfds</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>");
Response.End();
Why not let WORD do its owns translation since it understands HTML.
Read your Excel cells
Write your values into a HTML textfile as it would be a WORD document.
Open WORD and let it read that HTML file.
Instruct WORD to save the document as a new WORD document (if that is required).
I am planning on using pdf.js to have PDF context via the browser with Javascript. The problem is that some PDFs, the ones I am using, require Adobe's Reader with a specific Version. pdf.js does does not yet(ever?) support spoofing of these. What I need to know is if there's a way in C# to open the PDF and remove these Reader and Version requirements and how to do it. I was planning on using itextsharp to do other PDF manipulation server-side so an example using this would be most helpful. I plan on serving these as an ActionResult from an ajax request via MVC 4, so a MemoryStream would be most helpful at the end of this manipulation.
So in the end pdf.js was unable to do what I needed it too, however, what I was able to do was convert the Xfa/Pdf to a C# object then send the pages as needed via Json to my Javascript for rendering in the HTML5 Canvas. The code below takes an xfa-in-a-pdf file and turns it into a C# object with the help of itextsharp:
PdfReader.unethicalreading = true;
PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(new FileStream(Statics.PdfUploadLocation + PdfFileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read));
XfaForm xfaForm = new XfaForm(reader);
XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Parse(xfaForm.DomDocument.InnerXml);
string xfaNamespace = #"{http://www.xfa.org/schema/xfa-template/2.6/}";
List<XElement> formPages = xDoc.Descendants(xfaNamespace + "subform").Descendants(xfaNamespace + "subform").ToList();
TotalPages = formPages.Count();
var fieldIndex = 0;
RawPdfFields = new List<XfaField>();
for (int page = 0; page < formPages.Count(); page++)
{
RawPdfFields.AddRange(formPages[page].Descendants(xfaNamespace + "field")
.Select(x => new XfaField
{
Page = page,
Index = fieldIndex++,
Name = (string)x.Attribute("name"),
Height = GetUnitFromPossibleString((string)x.Attribute("h")),
Width = GetUnitFromPossibleString((string)x.Attribute("w")),
XPosition = GetUnitFromPossibleString((string)x.Attribute("x")),
YPosition = GetUnitFromPossibleString((string)x.Attribute("y")),
Reference = GetReference(x.Descendants(xfaNamespace + "traverse")),
AssistSpeak = GetAssistSpeak(x.Descendants(xfaNamespace + "speak"))
}).ToList());
}
Your PDF file n-400.pdf uses the Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA). This means you require a viewer that also supports XFA which pdf.js seemingly does not.
Such a PDF normally contains some standard PDF content which indicates that the PDF requires some viewer that supports XFA. In your case the content contains
If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document.
This actually indicates what a XFA enabled viewer does, it renders some pages based upon information in the XFA XML data and displays it instead of the PDF style page descriptions.
While being defined proprietarily by Adobe, the PDF specification ISO 32000-1 describes how XFA data is to be embedded in a PDF document, cf. section 12.7.8 XFA Forms.
If you only need those forms in a flattened state, you might want to have a look at iText Demo: Dynamic XFA forms in PDF.