Table of Contents

Basic Usage

PDFLib provides a simple way to convert HTML and CSS to PDF using a headless Chromium browser.

Initializing the Browser

The ChromiumBrowser class manages the lifecycle of the Chromium process. It's recommended to maintain a single instance of the browser throughout your application's lifetime.

using PDFLib.Chromium;

// Initialize the browser
using var browser = new ChromiumBrowser();
await browser.StartAsync(new BrowserOptions());

Basic HTML to PDF

To generate a PDF, you create a new page (similar to a tab in a browser), set its content, and then print it to a PDF stream.

var html = "<html><body><h1>Hello World</h1><p>This is a PDF generated from HTML.</p></body></html>";
string outputPath = "output.pdf";

await using var outputPdf = File.Create(outputPath);
await using var page = await browser.CreatePageAsync();


// Print to PDF
await page.PrintToPdfAsync(html, outputPdf);
await outputPdf.FlushAsync();

For PDFs with no signature you can stream the response back to the user! Should be able to avoid using MemoryStream - as a result you won't see memory spikes since the PDF isn't being stored in memory.

For PDFs with signature it's unavoidable to have the PDF fully in memory. Sadly, the PDF specification doesn't allow for one-pass operations.

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