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I need to take a Word document that is a template of sorts...collect user input to populate specific fields in that template..then generate a PDF file that includes the completed template as well as a few other document types. Does anyone have a good suggestion on a component to achieve this? Preferably one that does not require Microsoft Office to be installed on the web server.
Try Aspose Words for .net. From their website: "Aspose.Words enables .NET and Java applications to read, modify and write Word® documents without utilizing Microsoft Word." Utilizing Aspose Words with Aspose PDF permits you to output to PDF.
One thing you do NOT want to do is install MS Word on your production server. Loading those objects is SLOW and EATS memory. You won't be able to use the CutePDF Writer unless you also install MS Word on the server. Yeck.
Is there a reason to use Word? If you start with a PDF with Form fields, you can either allow the user to fill out the fields, or do it programatically with iTextSharp's PDF stamper.
If you need to use MSOffice 2000/2003 components programmatically, you can try Office Web Components. They do need to be installed on the server, but can be used by .NET and Com apps to interact with office file types. More info here...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Web_Components
If you dig about on an office CD you should find the OWC installer for your version. I haven't worked with 2007, but I assume there is something similar available.
iTextSharp and OWC are no-cost, check the licensing for more details.
Hmmm...You might be able to employ CutePDF printer in a creative way to solve this problem. Essentially, it takes anything that can be fed through a standard print driver and makes a PDF out of it. It's free.
Try using The Apache POI API to populate the fields. It can get into Word documents and access their elements.
As for the Word -> PDF step, I'd also recommend evaluating the Aspose solution. It may even be able to perform both steps. Its not free, however.
My first thought for a "doc template" + merge to pdf solution would be to start with open office formats. - the odt file (open document template) is xml-based - so you could even use perl, to do the merge, then call writer's doc 2 pdf (I have no idea if they have an API, but one could find out in less than a day - even if one had to examine the source.)
and converting your "word" dot to a writer odt file is just a "file save as" operation in OoWriter.
If you use Aspose.Words, then your input document/template can be in one of the several supported formats including DOC, DOCX.
Then you can insert data into the document in a number of ways. You can use bookmarks in a document and just set their text. Or better yet use the reporting engine we provide. It allows to use standard MS Word MERGEFIELD fields plus adds capabilities for repeating regions and even nested. E.g. you can design an invoice (with parent/child data) template in MS Word and then populate from a .NET DataSet in one line of code.
Also, you only need Aspose.Words to produce PDF (a year ago you needed both Aspose.Words and Aspose.Pdf). You can also easily save the exactly the same looking document to DOC, DOC, DOCX and a few other formats.
I'm on the Aspose.Words dev team.
Have a look at the Muhimbi PDF Converter Web Services. It runs on Windows as a service, but can be accessed from any non-Windows web services capable environment including Java and .NET.
Although this solutions requires MS-Office to be installed on a server (not necessarily the same server as your application), it is very robust and provides perfect conversion fidelity.
To generate or Modify MS-Word files I recommend using the free Open XML SDK for Microsoft Office. Eric White maintains a really good Blog about it.
Disclaimer, I worked on this product. Having said that, it works great.
Related
I am searching from last two days but did not find any thing.
My requirement is to create a document viewer in my web application (C#.Net) and I don't want to use any third party tool for this. Can I convert the files in image or PDF or in any common formate which can be easly render on web page. I also can not use Introp object.
Any help will be highly appreciated
You mention in one of your comments that you'd like to write all the code yourself but don't know where to start. Here's how I would go about it...
First, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the Microsoft Office Format specification. You can find that here (there's a link to the technical specification). Office documents are actually a .zip file with an XML file inside along with any binary data representing attachments. Just renamed a .docx file as .zip and you'll be able to open it up and see the XML and any other supporting documents inside (same is true for xlsx, etc...).
Then you'll need to become intimately familiar with either PDF or HTML, as your job now will be to convert the various Office document structure into PDF or HTML structure, being sure to respect page layout, margins, order, etc...
As others have said, this is a large task which is why third party tools exist today. Also, each third party toolset has it's limitation as this is really hard to "get right" in all situations and there will be edge cases that work for one document and not another (because maybe they didn't use Microsoft Word to save the .docx, maybe they used OpenOffice and OpenOffice interpreted the standard slightly differently...)
If you cannot use COM/Interop technologies in your solution, you can take a look at the specialized 3rd party options. I see that you prefer not to use them, however, there are no existing built-in solutions in the .NET Framework. Check out my answer in a similar thread that describes how to accomplish exactly the same task using 3rd party libraries (for example, DevExpress, since I have experience with it). In addition, take a look at the Documents demo, where you can see how to create images/thumbnails from different types of MS Office documents.
I believe what you need is an intermediate representation of the documents which can be converted into an image for the viewer to display.
Lets me try to explain with the below diagram:
You can use tools like smallpdf or OfficeToPDF to do that. Just integrate them into your application.
Small PDF(https://smallpdf.com/library-detail)
officetopdf (https://officetopdf.codeplex.com/)
I'm writing a program that modifies word documents. Currently I have used Microsoft.Office,Interop.Word to work with Word document and it requiers Microsoft Office to be installed on users computer, but some my clients don't have MS Office, but they have Open Office.
So, which library should I use instead of Interop?
and also how can I make my code to be able to work with different word files, not only .doc and .docx, but also with other office program files?
currently I'm writing different code for every type of the document..
My program translates the documents from its original language to another, so it is very important for me to keep the formatting of the document in original format, that's why I used Interop.. but also I want my program to be useful for as many people as possible
I think you are not mentioning but, are you assuming all your clients use the same version of Office. To solve the issue of the office versions, you may want to look at this open source project: NetOffice http://netoffice.codeplex.com/ and do all your .doc and .docx file formats development in using that library.
For the OpenOffice or LibreOffice, I believe the best you can do is going into the projects website and download the SDK. For example, go here: http://api.libreoffice.org/examples/examples.html and you will find some examples in Java, Python, C++ to edit Text Document including odt files.
LibreOffice SDK download here: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
And finally, there is also the OpenXML format (mentioned on another answer) which is:
ECMA Office Open XML ("Open XML") is an international, open standard for word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that can be freely implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms.
And you can download also its SDK here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb265236.aspx
Hope that helps.
You will likely end up writing separate code to work with each file type. There may be some similarities within, say, Office products, but for the most part you're going to need an adapter for each type.
However, you could (and should) minimize the amount of duplicate code by placing the translation logic and other non-type-specific functions in a shared library that each adapter would then reference.
We are using aspose words. This supports DOC, DOCX, RTF and OOXML.
But it's not free.
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Is there a pdf library attached/that can be attached to .NET 3.5 that allows creation of pdf files at runtime i.e opening a new pdf file, writing to it line by line, embedding images, etc and closing the pdf file all in C# code?
What I want is a set of tools and specifications which allow me to implement a customised pdf writer in C# without using Reporting Services' pdf output option.
iTextSharp is no longer licensed under the MIT/LGPL license. Versions greater than 4.1.6 are licensed under the Affero GPL, meaning you can't even use it in a SaaS (Software as a Service) scenario without licensing your code under the GPL, or a GPL-compatible license.
Other opensource PDF implementations in native .NET include
PDF Clown (make sure you get the patches to the latest version)
PDFSharp
PDFJet open source edition (commercial version also available, and you will need the JDK installed to build this)
There's also a couple of Java PDF libraries (like PDFBox) you can convert to .NET using IKVM.
iTextSharp
http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/
Complex but comprehensive.
itext7 former iTextSharp
Have a look at PDFSharp
It is open source and it is written in .NET, I use it myself for some PDF invoice generation.
Well, free and not-for-free, I use WebSuperGoo ABCpdf .NET component, that I just love it!
not-for-free because you need to pay for it.
for free because even if you have to pay, they have a trial version and you can request a free license if you do not mind that, in your site show "This site uses WebSuperGoo ABCpdf .NET component" with a link to their website.
I did that and I got a free license (version 5 in that time) so, I can say that it works (even if the website is no longer online) - I still have and use the component ~:)
A wonderful thing that I love with this is that you can do everything that you can thing off with this, create PDF forms and dynamically fill them and send to user by mail or have them to download it, create a pdf from scratch, convert HTML pages into PDF, etc etc etc, please read the documentation, it is a wonderful component.
I strongly recommend: iTextSharp
I have used Gnostice in the past and found them to be very good.
http://www.gnostice.com/PDFOne_dot_Net.asp
I have posted a sample of how to use iTextSharp in one of my blogs:
http://devpinoy.org/blogs/marl/archive/2008/02/14/create-pdf-in-c-2008-a-pdf-sample-app-for-grade-1-pupils.aspx
For this i looked into running LaTeX apps to generate a pdf. Although this option is likely to be far more complicated and heavy duty than the ones listed here.
Amyuni PDF Converter .Net can also be used for this. And it will also allow you to modify existing files, apply OCR to them and extract text, create raster images (for thumbnails generation for example), optimize the output PDF for web viewing, etc.
Usual disclaimer applies.
There is a new project, RazorPDF which can be used from ASP.NET MVC. It is available as nuget package (search for RazorPDF).
Here is more info: http://nyveldt.com/blog/post/Introducing-RazorPDF
IMPORTANT UPDATE as #DenNukem pointed out, it depends on iTextsharp, I forgot to edit answer when I found that out (when I tried to use it), so if your project is not open source and eligible for their AGPL licence, it will probably be too expensive to use.
Docotic.Pdf library can be easily used to create PDF files at runtime. The library can also modify existing PDF documents (extract text/images, append pages, fill form fields, etc.)
Samples for common tasks are available on the library site.
Disclaimer: I work for Bit Miracle.
I have used (iTextSharp) in the past with nice results.
How about iTextSharp?
iText is a PDF (among others) generation library that is also ported (and kept in sync) to C#.
I am planning on generating a Word document on the webserver dynamically. Is there good way of doing this in c#? I know I could script Word to do this but I would prefer another option.
I've worked at a company in the past that really wanted generated word documents, in the end they were perfectly satisfied with RTF docs that had a ".doc" extension. Word has no problem recognizing and opening them.
The RTF docs were generated with iText.net (free .net library), the API is pretty easy to use, performs extremely well, you don't need word on the machine, also, you could extend to generating PDF, HTML, and Text docs in the future with very little effort. After four years the solution I created is still in place, so that's a little testimony in iText.net's favor.
It looks like the official iText page suggests that iText Sharp is the best .Net choice right now, so that's another option
You'd be better off generating an rtf file, which word will know how to open.
If want to generate Office 2007 documents check the Open XML File Formats, they're simple zipped XML files, check this links:
Open XML File Formats: What is it, and how can I get started?
Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats
Edit: Check this project, can serve you as a good starting point:
DocumentMaker
Seems very simple and customizable, look this code snippet:
Paragraph p = new Paragraph();
p.Runs.Add(new Run("Text can have multiple format styles, they can be "));
p.Runs.Add(new Run("bold and italic",
TextFormats.Format.Bold | TextFormats.Format.Italic));
doc.Paragraphs.Add(p);
Word will quite happily open a HTML with a .doc extension. If you include an internal style sheet, you can have it fully formatted. There was previous post on this subject:
Export to Word Document in C#
Creating the old .DOC files (pre-Word 2007) is nigh-impossible without Word itself. The format is just too complex. Microsoft has released the format description, but it's enough to reduce a grown programmer to tears. There is a reason for that too (historical), but that doesn't make things better.
The new .DOCX would be easier, although quite a bit of hassle still. However depending on which Word versions you are targeting, there are some other options too.
For one, there is the classic .RTF. The format is pretty complex still, yet well documented and has strong support across many applications and platforms. And you might use some string-replacing into template files to make things easier (it's non-binary).
Then there are the "old" Word XML files. I think they worked starting with Word XP. Kinda the predecessors of .DOCX. I've used them, not bad. And the documentation is pretty OK.
Finally, the easy way that I would choose, is to make a simple HTML. Word can load HTML files just fine starting with version 2000. In the simplest way just change the extension of a HTML file to .DOC and you have it. You can also add a few word-specific tags and comments to make it look even better in Word. Use the Word's Save As...HTML option to see what they are.
There are third party libraries about that will do the job.
Doing a quick google came up with this one, for example.
I haven't tried any, so I can't give you specific advice, I'm afraid!
Let us know how you get on...
In Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a new file format called the Microsoft Open Office XML Format (.docx). This format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word. Since this is XML you can create or read with out having a Word installed.
Here is the component that generates document based on the custom template. The documents are generated from the sharepoint list ... so the data is pulled from the list item into the document on the fly:
http://store.sharemuch.com/products/generate-word-documents-from-sharepoint-list
Hope that helps,
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy
Blog: www.sharemuch.com
See title...
No.
You can use WordML (Word XML)
Word 2007 version
You can create Word 2007 documents using its XML format without the need of installing Word in your server.
This can be a starting point.
I've already +1'd Mitch's reply, but as an aside: Word isn't even supported for use in service applications; it is designed to be user-interactive. So installing Word, even if it worked, wouldn't leave you in a great place.
If you're just generating the documents from scratch the solutions so far proposed work well. My situation was that I had an existing template that I needed to use and substitute in my own text in a few places (mail merge, if you will). This was several years ago - prior to Office 2007 - but we ended up going with the Aspose library of components for this. I've used the Words and Cells (Excel) components to generate documents from templates and spreadsheets on the fly to download from web sites. The interfaces are a little clunky and can be inconsistent between the various products. The installer, frankly, is awful, but the products work pretty well and made it much easier to do what needed to be done.
Word recognizes rtf as intrinsic, and if your intended document can be constructed as whatever.rtf - which for all of its fancy formatting is plain ASCII markup - then you shd be able to write the document without Word installed.
To get the picture, create an example document and save it as an rtf file. Then view that file with an ascii text editor (like Notepad). You'll have to learn rtf syntax, but there's at least one handbook around on that.
AS
Just to add another potential solution for you, OfficeWriter is a Word/Excel API that lets you create documents and spreadsheets in ASP.NET without using Office:
http://www.officewriter.com