Oddur Magnusson

Object reference not set to an instance of a human being

PDF generation in .net ?

Do you guys have any recommendations on components that allow me to generate PDF documents on the fly. Being able to sign  them is a plus.

Posted: Nov 19 2003, 10:20 PM by oddurmag | with 11 comment(s)

Comments

Dennis said:

Crystal Reports can do it, if that's the sort of thing you're generating.
# November 19, 2003 5:27 PM

Pieter said:

For reports I use Crystal that comes with .Net. Very easy to do.
See http://www.vbcity.com/forums/faq.asp?fid=15&cat=Crystal%20Reports
For other documents, such as letters you can use ABCpdf. (http://www.websupergoo.com.)

# November 19, 2003 5:28 PM

Paul Glavich said:

Even tho crystal does what you are after, if you can use a single .Net managed component such as ABCpdf or TallPDF I would recommend them (haven't personally used them but reports from others users are favourable). If the PDF documents are pretty simple crystal will be ok, but after doing a large crystal report for our organisation and having many many problems with Crystal, I would not use it again.

email me at glav@aspalliance.com if you want any details.
# November 19, 2003 5:36 PM

Scott Prugh said:

XmlPDF is great. Really easy to use and cost effective.

www.xmlpdf.com

-Scott

sprughattelutiondotcom
# November 19, 2003 5:38 PM

Jan Tielens said:

We have used iTextSharp in a project. It works quite nice once you get used to the layout stuff (no gui). Lots of examples available! http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/
# November 19, 2003 5:38 PM

Oddur Magnusson said:

I'm not generating any reports. I'm generating simple text documents that have to be in a certain look&design. This is for meeting notes. I've been looking at something like http://report.sourceforge.net.
# November 19, 2003 5:40 PM

Matt Hawley said:

I second iTextSharp, very easy to use and good support too.
# November 19, 2003 6:28 PM

Snorrk said:

A while a go I looked at all .NET PDF components I could find.
The candidates where TallPDF, ABCpdf and one other (don't remember the name).

When I realized that I could manipulate the PDF data directly with ABCpdf (www.websupergoo.com) - I decided to use that. The fact that I can edit the Postcript code (insert pictures etc.) makes it very flexible but quite complicated.

If you're not afraid of reading the PDF specs (http://partners.adobe.com/asn/tech/pdf/specifications.jsp) you can do a lot more with ABCpdf than with the others..

Sendu mér bara póst ef þú vilt fá demo (snorri@remax.is)..

>S
# November 19, 2003 6:36 PM

Fabrice said:

I don't know these tools but you'll find many there:
http://sharptoolbox.madgeek.com/Pages/Category.aspx?Category=06b11e47-524b-4996-8ddc-acab527d2aaa
# November 19, 2003 6:52 PM

DonXML Demsak said:

I've been using XMLPDF for a while now, and love it.

DonXML Demsak
# November 19, 2003 7:21 PM

Jon Galloway said:

I've used WebGrabber (http://www.activepdf.com/en/Products/WebGrabber) called from a WebService. The nice thing about WebGrabber is that it converts a URL to a PDF, so you can design your PDF as a dynamic ASPX page without having to learn another funky layout / markup language or object model.
# November 20, 2003 1:11 AM
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