PDF Lib
An open source PDF library using .NET which focuses on rendering PDFs from HTML/CSS, and optionally signing them with digital signatures.
| File | Page Count |
|---|---|
| sample | 2 |
| medium | 140 |
| x2-large | 280 |
| x3-large | 420 |
Features
- Can reuse your frontend code to generate PDFs!
- Can sign PDFs with digital signatures
- Different wait strategies to use to indicate a page is ready for printing
The Journey:
This project started off as me being bored, a descent into madness. Was curious what it would take to create a PDF in C#. Quite the journey that was!
Initially I created a translation layer which converted Razor syntax into PDF syntax. However, it became obvious that styling and layouts were painful to do. As a developer, I felt I should be able to reuse the same frontend code to generate PDFs.
HTML/CSS to PDF became the focus. Manually creating the layout/renderer didn't sound reasonable when existing engines such as Blink (Chrome) and WebKit (Safari) already exist. Blink is pixel-perfect, what you see in the browser is what you get in the PDF. So I went with Blink!
Decided to leverage Chromium's headless shell, which requires using the Chromium Developer Protocol (CDP). Unfortunately, it uses base64 encoding on top of using JSON for communication. Thus, a 33% increase in data size off the rip.