I am too cheap to buy crystal reports so i built the report in asp.net, the only problem I'm facing is printing the report and making it look professional. On different printer's the report looks diff, i want to be able to control the final output and make the report print standard across all printers. You guys have any suggestions on how to achieve this properly?
Why not just use Reporting Services? It's free and easy to integrate with both WebForms and WinForms apps. Supports export to PDF, Excel, etc.
Mabye a stylesheet? Google it, good luck
You could try implementing a print stylesheet (you'll find many examples Googling the term), but that can be laborious if you're not familiar with css.
If you're checking out pdf solutions, I've used iTextSharp to create pdfs. It's relatively easy, open source and mature and used by many corporations.
You could try printing to a PDF. Not sure what your budget is, but ExpertPDF is a good option I'm using now.
You could create the report as a PDF using a C# library such as PDFsharp (Open-Source).
This approach allows you to:
Serve PDF files to your user, giving them the option to:
print it now
archive it for later use
Automatically email reports to your users using a scheduled task
Store generated PDFs in a database or on the file system
cutePDF is a free PDF writer and should work for what you need
Related
I am wondering the best way to make bills, or reports or anything printing related in WPF. I am thinking of using iTextSharp but I wanna see what other ways are there. Can anyone here direct me in the right way? Thanks in advance!
If you are coding for POS(Point Of Sale) System, then you can use System.Drawing.Printing Library for printing bill, which is really fast.
For reports, use crystal reports for dynamic pdf reports generation because you can export it to pdf, excel and rpt.
The OpenXML SDK is Microsoft's own library for working with Office (> 2007) documents: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=30425 . It's reasonably straightforward to use, and comes with the handy 'OpenXMLSDKTool' which takes existing Office files and creates the source code required to generate them.
Could you give me some recommendations on free/Openspurce library etc that could be integrated on asp.net application to Generate Pdf out of Html fragments. I will be generating Invoices that is displayed in DataGrid and tables. Is there some readily available library that would print the whole Table with Datagrid into Pdf. ITextSharp seems nice but i will have to do the tough work of adding tables and blah blah when everything is already in the webpage.
this is a possible duplicate but it generates pdf from Full page which is not desired
Possible duplicate question
ITextSharp does almost what you ask and is Open Source, however the API for conversion process has not been touched for years and is outdated. I therefore would recommend a commercial product.
Something like Winnovative HTML to PDF Converter
To be honest I look at it like this, you can save money by buying a licence for a commercial product rather than spending days developing a solution yourself.
Edit If it is for generating invoices alone then I would use iTextSharp as it does not take long to learn the basics. However if you want to be able to convert a full rich webpage into a PDF then go down the commercial route.
These links may help:
Convert HTML to PDF in .NET
Generate PDF from ASP.NET from raw HTML/CSS content?
Creating PDF Invoices - Are there any templating solutions?
When doing invoices, I usually go a slightly different way, by starting with Aspose.Words and using the nested mail merge feature.
Another option could be the HTML to PDF feature of Aspose.Pdf.
Both libraries are commercial only, I don't know whether this is appropriate for your project.
I am developing an application that is able to open and display PDFs after I open them and print them to another PDF using CutePDF, but the originals are not viewable.
I am looking for a way to programmatically open a PDF file, and print to another PDF file (not necessarily using CutePDF, just printing to another PDF is the desired functionality).
This will be integrated into a C# .NET project. Are there any suggestions how to go about doing this?
Thanks.
You could use Office Interop and generate the PDF, when you say "print to another pdf", I imagine you mean just generate? Or are you saying spool them to a pdf print driver that essentially will just create a PDF to be saved.
Use iText, which is available in Java and C# versions. I have used the Java version successfully. I recommend the iText in Action book to help you get up to speed with iText faster. The book discusses only the Java API, but I imagine you will be able to learn the principles of iText from the book and then figure out the minor differences for the C# version.
To implement this you can use PDFFlow library for generating PDF files from C#. It has easy fluent syntax and many features.
Here are many examples of real complex PDF documents: examples
Good luck :)
I have a pdf file which I want to open in a Windows Forms Application and perform following tasks-
View the pdf document
Zoom +/- document
Search Text
Highlight a specific text
Show it in a listbox/dropdown
select those words and highlight in pdf
Remove selection/Highlight.
I have tried using certain libraries like pdfSharp/iTextSharp even Acrobat Reader OCX control.
Its really bugging me..is there any help??
I'd suggest looking at some means of converting the PDF if you don't have a direct need to edit it. Even then, it may be easier to convert to a different form, make changes, and then convert back. PDF is a form of PostScript, which makes it powerful, but also makes it a mess to deal with and my personal preference is to skip that headache. Not always avoidable (had a lot of fun creating Thai support in PDF print#home ticket creation once without bloating the document beyond unusable), but highly recommended where possible.
Anyways, there are a variety of PDF conversion libraries out there, some of which may be available for .NET. Worst case, you may need to create a managed C++ layer to allow your C# code to access them.
Doesn't acrobat reader OCX already have all those features ? What exactly doesnt the OCX do that you need to do in your code ?
You might try contacting Adobe and getting their full SDK for PDF. It might have controls which you can use to solve your problem.
Come to think of it , is there even an SDK for PDF from Adobe ?
You have not mentioned your preference of using Free or Commercial PDF Viewer option. If you are open to use Commercial PSF viewer, you may evaluate SyncFusion PDF Viewer control, Telerik PDF Viewer, Dynamic PDF Viewer or TallComponents. I have checked feature set and all seem to have features you are looking for. I do not represent or promote any of these SDKs, I have used TallComponents and Dynamic PDF for PDF manipulation and both have excellent support, I would say PDF Veterans in .NET space.
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.