Generate PDF documents from a HTML page using ASP.NET. Generating Dynamic PDF Documents using the Open Source Scryber Library. Generating PDF in.Net 2.0 and C#. Posted on 2007-06-18.NET Programming; C#; ASP.NET; 3 Verified Solutions. Last Modified: 2013-11-26. Hi, I am working on.Net 2.0, C# I want to generate PDF on the fly. Generate PDF Using C# - Code. Project. Using Open. Office to convert different document types to PDF. Open. Office 2. 4. ![]() At the end of the article there is link to the instructions that will make code work with Open. Office 3. Introduction. I must confess that I’m not a big fan of PDF. Still, it somehow manages to wiggle in almost every project I'm on – clients want to send out documents, Word is bounded to Windows, HTML is lame, PDF it is. Unfortunately, the situation with it and C# haven’t changed much in couple past years - if there were no new, fancy, priced components, I would conclude that it’s almost the same as it was in . NET 1. 1 times – it is a pain to create PDFs. For those of you who have access to components which can convert popular formats to PDF, this article is pretty much useless. ![]() But, for those who don’t want or simply can’t shell out over $1. PDF – I hope that this solution will prove as an attractive alternative. Idea. During a talk with my friend Toni Ru. It seems that it has been around for quite some time, but as it is mainly targeted at Java developers, it is no wonder that there were no big fuss about it in C# groups. Still, it promises much – you install Open. Office, start it in Service mode, send commands over the API, and get to use any feature it provides. More than anything else, my interest was to load any supported format into Open. Office and then export it as PDF. Just to note, in this article, I'll talk about creating PDF from other documents, not from scratch. If you are looking for a way to do that, I'm encouraging you to first take a look at my Generating Word Reports / Documents article. Follow it, and you'll easily create Word. How to generate a pdf from html web page? There is a new JQuery solution that will render any HTML page and its CSS (including print media rules) to PDF. The solution is setup to print any region of your webpage. Generate PDF from HTML Using C#.Net Click here to download the required dlls for generating PDF. Generate PDF from HTML First, set a reference in your project to the 3 DLL's that Pdfizer uses. Generate PDF from HTML with C# in ASP.NET. PDF Duo.Net is a component for use in ASP.NET (VB, C# etc.) It converts HTML to PDF, provides several methods and properties for multi-purpose customization of the PDF. ![]() ML files (like the one used here) from a database or XML. Solution architecture. I was saddened to find out that the headless mode of Open. Office just minimizes GUI operations, not totally avoiding them. As someone who has a pretty nasty experience with Word. Application. Open() (using interactive applications such as Word by programmatically mimicking user actions), I started thinking on how to isolate Open. Office and query it independently of the main application process, thus enabling loose coupling and a more stable environment. The result was a Windows Service which wraps the Open. Office process, taking care of the security context and the usage, while providing the needed functionality over Remoting (am I a service- oriented freak or what? It employs various classes from the unoidl. Open. Office, and mimics operations such as opening a file, exporting it as PDF, etc. It also uses the Office. Controller class which is responsible for the lifecycle of Open. Office’s process – it starts, monitors, and finally kills soffice. Receiver is the class that my Windows Service registers for usage over Remoting. It implements the IReceiver interface (needed functionality), and serves as the bridge between the main applications and Open. Office. Finally, I’ve created the Generic. Sender class for those not familiar with Remoting. It provides the Init method that accepts an address on which the Windows Service wrapper listens (by default, it is tcp: //localhost: 6. Open. Office. Service. Receiver) and initializes a proxy receiver (available as a property). From that point forwards, everything is simple as Generic. Sender. Receiver. Convert. To. PDF(..). How to start everything on my machine? Let’s do this in a step- by- step fashion: Download Open. Office from here, and perform the standard installation. I’ve developed and tested a solution using version 2. OO. If you are setting up everything on an x. OO program directory (by default: c: \Program Files (x. Open. Office. org 2. PATH environment variable as described in this forum post. If you change the environment variable, be sure to restart the machine in order to commit and reload the changes. Download the source code that accompanies this article, and Build Solution using the Release configuration in Visual Studio 2. When the build is complete, check Open. Office. Service/bin/Release and run svc. After that, you should see the Open. Office Wrapper Service in the list of services when you go to Control Panel - > Administrative Tools - > Services. Right click on it, select Properties, go to the Log on tab, and check Allow service to interact with desktop. Before you can start the service, you need to tweak the license agreement. Because the wrapper service will run under the Local. System account, you need to somehow tell Open. Office that the Local. System user “accepted” the terms of use. To prevent the license agreement dialog from popping up and blocking everything, you need to modify the file at %OOInstall. Path%\share\registry\data\org\openoffice\Setup. If you have downloaded the source code, you can right click on Default. Test Applications - > PDFWeb project) in Solution Explorer and choose View in Browser.. Here is a code excerpt that uses the Generic. Sender from Open. Office. Service. Objects. Give. Me. PDFButton! You now have a functioning PDF converter which can be queried from C#, by Remoting. During the wrapper implementation, I thought about multi- threading and (hopefully) made calling the Convert. To. PDF thread safe. Conversion requests are queued and processed one by one, so the Open Office Wrapper Service can be used by more than one application and, why not, from multiple machines too (the generic sender for the application running on other machines should then be initialized with tcp: //%machine. Hosting. Service%: 6. Open. Office. Service. Receiver). Configuration. Currently, there are the following settings for the Open Office Wrapper Service: Port – It’s the port on which the service will listen for requests. By default, it is 6. Process. Name – The name of the Open. Office process (used when searching the process list to see if OO is alive). When you start Open. Office in headless mode, it is soffice. Path. To. Open. Office – Self- explanatory, eh? If you have installed Open. Office on a path other than the default, you should change this setting (the default path is c: \Program Files\Open. Office. org 2. 4\program\soffice. Program Files). Seconds. Idle. Allowed – When a conversion request is submitted, Open. Office. Controller checks if OO is running in the background, and if not, starts soffice. By default, if no new request is made in 6. Open. Office process will be killed. Check. Interval. In. Seconds – The interval in which the service evaluates Open. Office usage (bound to the previous setting). By default, it is 3. Request. Timeout. In. Seconds – The time in which a response is expected from Open. Office. If the item stays in the queue for too long or Open. Office gets too big a file for processing, a Timeout Exception will be thrown. The default wait is 3. Running in- process? I would like to mention once again that the Windows Service I wrote is only there to provide a security context and serve as a bridge to Open. Office. Wrapper. dll that implements the main stuff when it comes to communicating with Open. Office. If you wish, you can directly reference Open. Office. Wrapper. dll and perform PDF conversions in- process, but you must be sure that your application will be run with sufficient security privileges! In my testing, the conversion was successful only if I run the application under an account that belonged to the Administrator group. Also, you could run into trouble when trying to run Open. Office. Wrapper on x. Windows. I’ve had tons of trouble trying to get my Web Application to convert PDF by using the Open. Office. Wrapper in process on a Windows 2. So, if you really do not need to have everything in your application’s process, leave the code that wraps Open. Office separated, and use it through a Windows Service. Words of warnings and words of thanks. To me, the documentation of Open. Office is terrible. OK, I could be another C# . But, for me - after an absolute champion of useless information, unrelated links, and broken searches in the MSDN - the OO developer portal is one more example of how you do not want your documentation to be organized. From what I’ve seen, Open. Office is a great product considering the cost ($0), and it is a shame that I can’t say the same for its documentation. On the other hand, posts of server users on the OOo. Forum are really helpful; I would specifically like to thank Lars. B, tcedi, and Danny. B. Most of the conversion code in Convert. To. PDF. cs is taken from Lars. B’s Commandline PDF convertor; so, thank you man – I hope you’ll continue to post useful snippets. Conclusion. With this article, I aimed at a simple goal – to provide an easy- to- follow, free, and versatile solution for converting documents to PDF by using C#. I am aware that there are technically more robust solutions, but I do not know any of them that’s free. If you know – please post it in the comments section along with an impression of this article. HTML to PDF API with CSS2 and Java. Script. Convert HTML to PDF in C#/Java/PHP/Ruby/Python/. NET/Perl etc. Our HTML to PDF API allows you to convert HTML to PDF files with great ease, power and performance. You can use it manually and in any programming language. You will get a lot of different settings to optimize your conversion and make sure the PDF looks exactly the way YOU want it. Some of the use cases for our API are: You want to generate PDF forms like proposals / invoices / timesheets etc. You want to generate PDFs from data in a database and you know how to create regular web pages from the database. You want to generate reports as PDFYou want to not only display a PDF, but also save it as a local file and then choose what you want to do with it. You want to create PDFs from different sources and merge them into one bigger PDF New! You want to create professional PDFs and use your own stationary as background New! Here’s how easy it is: suppose you’d like to convert the web page http: //www. PDF. You would just send the following HTTP request to get the PDF: http: //api. Note All the examples below show the examples based on HTTP GET, but you can also use HTTP POST to access our API! If you want to see how you do this in C# / Java / PHP / Ruby / Python / VB. Perl then click here to go directly to the coding examples. We have established a network of GLOBAL servers, which allows you to choose a server close to you to do the conversion so the PDF is served to you with the lowest latency possible. Choose the API call of your choice for the data center closest to you. Data center. API call. Europe (London, UK)http: //europe. USA (Atlanta, USA)http: //usa. Asia (Tokio, Japan)http: //asia. Basic function parameters. The following choices represent the basic functions you can execute with the API – you can either convert from a URL or raw HTML, or you can MERGE previous conversions together into one file. New! Raw HTML code that you’d like to have converted. We recommend you POST the data to our API whenever you want to use raw HTML code, because appending this to the query string has limitations to the length of the HTML code. Also – when you don’t POST the data you should make sure to encode the HTML properly. Parameter. Descriptionurl. URL of the web page that you’d like have converted. Note that you must properly escape the ampersands (& ) if you want to pass additional query parameters (more info in our blog). The URL must also include the whole domain including the . After two hours we delete your PDFs from our cache and they can no longer be merged. Layout parameters. By default the PDF will be created with the conversion settings you set in the members area. There you can set page format, margins, header & footer and other important settings. We allow you to override most of these in each conversion. You can do so with the parameters in the tables below. Parameter. Descriptionfilename. Filename for the PDFpagesize. Set page size like A3, A4, Letter etc. Please refer to the list of allowed page sizesorientation. Specify portrait or landscape orientationwidth. Custom width of the PDFheight. Custom height of the PDF, if you specify the width, but not the height, then we fit the whole page into a one page PDF by auto- adjusting the height of the PDF. Left marginright. Right margintop. Top marginbottom. Bottom marginunit. Unit for size & margin settings. We’ll use mm in case you don’t specify a unit. Page numbering etc is explained in the members area. Page numbering etc is explained in the members area. This should be a valid URL (starting with http: // or https: //) – to a location where you defined your header HTML. Page numbering etc is explained in the members area. This should be a valid URL (starting with http: // or https: //) to a location where you defined your footer HTML. Page numbering etc is explained in the members area. Page offset, which is used to adjust page numbering in your header and footer. Please also have a look at your members area for more details. Set the CSS media type so you can influence better how your content is converted to PDF. We currently support the values print and screen. If you don’t specify one, we take the one you’ve set in the members area. The default there is screen. See w. 3schools for more information on CSS media types. Print will normally give you a more print- friendly layout. If you set this to y we will return a URL to the PDF on our server instead of the actual PDF. This allows you to generate the PDF, without having to use bandwith to serve it to your visitors. Use this parameter to render your PDF with Java. Script on or off. Use this parameter to set the time in milliseconds that we take to complete Java. Script processing. Note on measurements: in case you only specify a height then we’ll ignore it; In case you only specify a width we’ll assume you want a single page PDF. In case you specify one or more margins, but not all, we’ll assume the others to be 0. Encryption and password protection. You can also use encryption settings to encrypt the PDF we generate and – if you want – you can protect it with a password or use rights management to control which things the user is allowed to do with the PDF. The below table lists all the options you can pass for this. Parameter. Descriptionencryption. The level of encryption for the PDF. You can choose the following values: 4. RC4 encryption. 1. RC4 encryption, requires Acrobat reader 5 or later. AES encryption, requires Acrobat reader 7 or later. AES encryption, requires Acrobat reader X or laterownerpass. The master password that controls all encryption & rights settings for the PDF. The password a user needs to open the PDF. If set, Acrobat Reader will prevent users from printing the PDF. If set, Acrobat Reader will prevent users from copying content from the PDF. If set, Acrobat Reader will prevent users from modifying the PDF. Watermarking and stamping your PDFIn some cases you’d like to watermark your PDF, e. The below table lists all the options you can pass for this. Note that we consider stamping the same as watermarking, because if you use an opacity of 1 (fully opague) your watermark will come out like a stamp. Parameter. Descriptionwm. The full URL where we can find the image you want to use as watermark. Please make sure the image is really there. This is a “real” number between 0 and 1. If you want it twice as wide, set this to 2. If you want it half as high, set this to 0. Stationary aka (full) page background New! If you want your company’s PDFs to have your own stationary as background – then look no further. The API allows you to set your own stationary (or page background) for the pages of the PDF. You can use the same image for all the pages, or you can have a different image for the first page, the last page and all pages in between. The image will be set as background, so all items you have in your HTML will appear over it. Note that non- transparent images or CSS background- color will be rendered OVER this. As opposed to watermarks, which start (by default) in the top left corner of the CONTENT area, stationary starts at the top left corner of the full page. That’s also why we call it stationary as it resembles a real piece of paper. Parameter. Descriptionbg. The full URL where we can find the image you want to use as stationary for the first page. Please make sure the image is really there. If you don’t specify bg. ALL your pages. bg. The URL where we can find the image you want to use as stationary for the pages in between the first and last page. The URL where we can find the image you want to use as stationary for the last page of your PDF. This is a “real” number between 0 and 1. This then sets positioning and angle of rotation to 0. This then sets positioning and angle of rotation to 0. Authorization – converting content in your members area or authorization protocols. We understand that you can have content, which is only accessible to your private users, and still want to have it converted to PDF. We can surely help you with this. We first of all would recommend you to POST the data to our servers in the form of raw HTML in case you don’t want it to be accessed from outside your servers. We can also access your content over basic HTTP authentication with the parameters below. Furthermore we can utilize any other authorization protocol to access your content as long as you give us the specifics. Please contact us for more details. Parameter. Descriptionhttpuser. The user name you want us to use for the authenticationhttppass. The password you want us to use for the authentication. We’ve made examples that show you how to use the HTML to PDF API for URL to PDF conversion in all major programming languages below. If you feel we need to add examples or if you think there’s a better way of doing things, then please give us a shout out! It is very easy to convert a URL to PDF in PHP with our API. Just get the result of our URL with the PHP function get. In that case you just add the parameters that you found in the tables above. Say you want to convert http: //www. PDF with width 3. You’ve subscribed to our service and your API key is abcde. Therefore you want to send the following HTTP request: http: //api. You can use the following code in PHP to realize this. Just get the result of our URL with the Ruby class Net: :HTTP. Say you want to convert http: //www. PDF. You’ve subscribed to our service and your API key is abcde. This means you would want to send the following HTTP request: http: //api. You can use the following code in Ruby to accomplish this and get the PFD saved as . Just get the result of our URL with the C# Web. Client method. Say you want to convert http: //www. PDF. You’ve subscribed to our service and your API key is abcde. Therefore you want to send the following HTTP request: http: //api. You can use the following code in C# to accomplish this and save the PDF as . Just get the result of our URL with the VB. Web. Client. Let’s say as an example you want to convert http: //www.
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