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Closed 11 years ago.
What's the best .NET PDF editing library available, and why?
It needs to be used on an IIS web-server.
Specifically, I need to edit a PDF which was generated by reporting services.
Factors I'm interested in:
Speed
Memory Consumption
Price
Quality of documentation
Library stability
Size of library
Whatever else you think is important
Have a look at iTextSharp. iTextSharp is a port of the iText , a free Java-Pdf library.
To quote iText:
You can use iText to:
Serve PDF to a browser
Generate dynamic documents from XML files or databases
Use PDF's many interactive features
Add bookmarks, page numbers, watermarks, etc.
Split, concatenate, and manipulate PDF pages
Automate filling out of PDF forms
Add digital signatures to a PDF file
And much more...
Syncfusion Essential PDF is the best. I have been using it for years. Also, Syncfusion provides a best support compared to other vendors.
I've researched quite a few tools that aren't offered specifically by Adobe, and the two that come to mind right away are Atalasoft's DotImage and LEADTools. They are both rather pricy, but provide server licensing and use the ultra-fast C++ GDI libraries.
There's a freeware .Net library called PDFSharp that uses .Net native GDI+, so it's slower and memory intensive. But then again, it's free.
webSupergoo have a super PDF library for .NET
Their ABCpdf product is designed for use with web servers. The documentation is clear and the installation is accompanied by an example website project.
If you visit their website you should see a link to the live demonstration:
http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-1.htm
ABCpdf 7 is the current version. The performance and reliability is excellent. The standard version costs $329 USD, but sometimes an installation can be obtained for free. The download size is about 30 MB. Supports both 32 and 64-bit servers.
I've used http://www.tallcomponents.com/ mainly to fill in pdf forms and then flatten the pdf. Seems to work fine. I haven't had any issues.
I don't know if it's the best, but I use PDF-Writer.NET, for which I paid $89. I have used it in several production applications. I like it because it's easy to set up and use, and it doesn't require a lot of coding, which makes it easier for new developers to ramp up on it.
Before that I was hacking together PDFs using an open source library and the Acrobat interop DLLs. That was rough.
Not sure about the PDF part but Aspose has a library for PDF. I've used their word library for generating word documents. their documentation is very decent in my opinion.
http://www.aspose.com/categories/file-format-components/aspose.pdf-for-.net-and-java/default.aspx
Check out Aspose.Pdf for .NET. It has a nice API, is well documented and has a light footprint.
Related
This question already has an answer here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
export to pdf in asp.net 3.5
What is a tools can I use to print asp.net pages ?
Is there any good software to create pdf files for asp.net?
is there any free software that takes care of this?
I like Expert PDF (http://www.html-to-pdf.net/). It converts regular HTML and CSS to a PDF format and opens in the associated reader on your local machine. Much easier than some of the other generators out there such as iText Sharp which require a lot of time learning the API. Unfortunately its a paid app, so if your company isn't willing to chip in for the license you might want to look at one of the free libraries.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) offers some good PDF generating functionality, though depending on your exact needs it may be too much. The best way to find out is to take a look at this page and see what you think: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/reporting-services.aspx
If you don't want to use the Report Viewer control, there is a blog post I've seen that details how you can avoid creating one: http://geekswithblogs.net/bsherwin/archive/2007/04/29/112094.aspx (It's in VB but could easily be converted to C#).
iTextsharp is widely used and of-course it is free.
Just download the DLL
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Closed 11 years ago.
Is there a .dll I can use which uses a PDF file as an input and HTML file as an output?
I want to convert from PDF to HTML. My colleague says that it's very difficult going step by step, getting text/font/image/margins/links etc. from PDF and then creating new HTML file with the same content. He says it's nearly impossible. So I was thinking - if there's some dll which I can use as a reference to do that?
Writing a program to do it is definitely not trivial. If you don't find any .NET Library to do this (I couldn't, at least not free), I would just download this and invoke it programmatically to get my html.
If you have the time to spare and/or PDFToHtml does not produce acceptable output for you, you could use iText to write the program yourself. It's a very mature free pdf library. I've used it in the past to manipulate PDFs (merge, create, etc).
UPDATE
As noted in the comment by Quandary, the PDFSharp library offers a more relaxed license (MIT) compared to the Commercial or AGPL license offered by iText. Keep this is mind when choosing your library. I have not used the PDFSharp library myself and I don't know how they compare in terms of functionality.
You can download this free tool: PDFToHTML
Then in your program just fork a new process and run the executable passing the PDF file. I just tested it now and it seems to work ok.
If you don't mind paying, Aspose offers a very good solution, this is what we use at my company.
http://www.aspose.com/categories/.net-components/aspose.pdf-for-.net/key-features.aspx
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Closed 11 years ago.
I found out that windows 8 is going to be heavily dependent on C++, HTML5 and CSS based apps(WPF ?). I spend a lot of time working on applications like matlab, scipy and C# as programming language at my workplace. Considering this, is there going to be any big change for desktop app developers ? are these apps going to be re-written under new code and C# has any future for desktop apps?
A lot of hearsay at the moment until September it seems there is nothing definite.
There is wide speculation on whether Jupiter will be the unifying
user-interface model for Windows, Web and mobile. Burela believes
Jupiter may a “next generation” XAML-based framework, perhaps a
“mashup between WPF & Silverlight.”
There also appears to be equally strong support for three key
programming languages: C# to appease the .NET developers, C++ to
appease the Windows core developers, and HTML5/JavaScript to try to
lure developers from other platforms.
Of course the controversy has been Microsoft’s focus on JavaScript
while nearly ignoring Silverlight and .NET developers. Articles like
this one — though unofficial and speculative — should help calm some
nervous developers.
Source: http://www.isdotnetdead.com/windows-8-supports-all-programming-models/#
ZDnet try asking probing questions.
Here is another link about the future of C#
Okay, your question confuses some terms - based on the articles you cite.
Microsoft are quoted as saying that the application they demonstrated on Windows 8 was written using HTML and JavaScript. The article interprets this as saying that WPF and Silverlight are likely to be binned in favour of HTML and JavaScript.
Let's have a think about this.
As far as I'm aware, Microsoft have been really keen to run applications in the Browser for a very long time. They have made ActiveX controls that run in a browser, they have written Silverlight to run in a browser. They are one of the leaders in the whole "browser based applications" concept. People may criticise their methods of achieving this in the past, but at least they were trying.
When you consider that Microsoft currently have a desktop package called Office and also a web-based package called Office365, you can understand why they might want to just have one package to maintain that works on the desktop and in a browser.
My final note - the ARS Technica article describes HTML tooling as inferior, but seeing as you can use the same tools to write a WPF application or an HTML application I don't agree with this point.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am getting a large website developed. The develop has asked me which do I prefer either sitefinity or umbraco. The site will be similar to wikipedia where users can come and edit pages without having to login. I would like to ask your opionions on these two csm systems and which one would you recommend for content website with a community feel and wiki features. Thanks
I disagree with #IrishChieftain's answer and would most certainly go with Umbraco!
I've built a number of websites in Umbraco (and have got my certification) and I have to say I absolutely love it!
XSLT is very easy to learn unless you come across some really complex functionality. But even then, you can resort to ASP.NET if you don't want to learn XSLT.
If it's a non-commercial (charity?) site, you may be able to obtain the community version of Sitefinity for free if you display their logo in the footer. Sitefinity has a lot to offer, including an ORM.
Umbraco on the other hand has, for me personally, an unhealthy reliance on XSLT to customize the content. That was the main reason I didn't go with it.
I would go for Sitefinity or N2 for this.
Contrary to what others have suggested, I find the use of XSLT in Umbraco advantageous on numerous levels. In particular the time it takes to make changes and see their results is very quick. Just create transform and put a macro in your page and you can see the results. You get access to all the site data as necessary directly in the transform. Also, the fact that you are just working in HTML within the XSL transform means that it would be easy for a non .NET web developer to make changes too. I've found that although this is a .NET based CMS there is little reason to perform anything in code so you only really have to have open the CMS and your favourite text editor (I'd suggest using a text editor and accessing static files this way (through FTP or whatever if you're not logged in to the machine the CMS is on) rather than through the CMS interface.
If you're looking for a CMS for a large website and with wiki features, look at Kentico CMS. It was designed for large number of documents and it's the most advanced .NET CMS I have seen.
It has a built-in user-contribution module that allows public users to create new content items from the live site and you can control who can do that (all/authenticated/selected roles) and what type of content items (news/pages/knowledge base articles) they can create. Kentico has a free version, but for this type of functionality, you would need a paid license. Still, if it meets your needs for user contributed content, it may pay for itself very quickly since AFAIK no other .NET CMS has this built-in.
Umbraco was possibly the worst CMS a few years back when it was in version 2. Things have changed though and, for me, it jumped to the top of the list when it hit version 4. I find Umbraco to be the easiest CMS to manage and develop in. The XSLT is probably the hardest thing to get used to here, but like others mentioned it isn't a show stopper because you can still do everything using Umbraco data access layer. The one thing i absolutely love about it is how easy it is for the end user. The UI is very intuitive and easy to grasp. The only downside i see with Umbraco is bugs and there are a whole lot of them even in version 4 releases. Most of them are UI bugs. However, some do affect advanced features such as packages. I would still go with Umbraco if i had to pick a choose a CMS for a project of any size.
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Closed 10 years ago.
We are in need of converting all MS Office documents to PDF, TIFF, or any similar image format with no loss in formatting (these are official documents that cannot have tampering).
Is there any way to do this without installing Office on the machine that would do this? Ideally, this would go on a server and run multi-threaded without the overhead of Office Automation.
You could use a third-party library such as Aspose.NET for document conversion, but I'm afraid - if high-fidelity rendering is critical - there is no way around using the original application.
Microsoft Office provides a converter API which allows conversions without Office being installed. However, not only might you be facing license issues (IANAL), this API only supports conversions of text-processing formats that don't require rendering the document (e.g. RTF -> DOC, DOC -> DOCX), so it is not really an option for you.
Update: Probably the best option would be to have a look at the SharePoint 2010 conversion engine, which is exactly made for automated (server-side) document conversions. It's quite heavy though (both hardware and pricing) so maybe it is overkill for your use-case.
If this application will be run on a dedicated machine (i.e. the machine's only job is to convert a gigantic collection of Office documents), your safest bet is probably to use Office automation in a single-threaded manner and let the app happily convert one file at a time. A multi-threaded Office Automation app would probably convert documents at a faster overall rate (especially on a multi-core processor), up to the point where the server crashes.
Office Open XML is a non-Office-Automation alternative, but since I'm currently battling its tendency to produce OutOfMemoryException errors when exporting to relatively small Excel files (~1MB), I can't really recommend it.