Question

Any idea how to render a PDF using iTextSharp so that it renders the page using CSS. The css can either be embedded in the HTML or passed in separately, I don’t really care, just want it to work.

Specific code examples would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I would really like to stick with iTextSharp, though if you do have suggestions for something else, it’s got to be free, open source, and have a license that permits using it in commercial software.

Answer 1

It’s not possible right now but nothing stops you from starting open-source project that will do it. I might actually start one, because I need it too!

Basically you will need parser that will convert html and css markup into iTextSharp classes. So <table> becames iTextSharp.SimpleTable and so on.

It would be easy to come up with prototype that would be able to work with limited html and css subset.

Update: Until the time this will be possible, this is how I temporarily resolved it for myself. Only two steps:

• Tell your users to download open-source app called PDFCreator

• Make all your html reports printer friendly by providing stylesheets for print.

  If some of your multi-page reports need to have headers on every page, set them up in THEAD html tag.

Now users will be able to print-friendly and if they choose PDFCreator printer driver, they will even be able to get report in PDF format (there are other pdf printer drivers but this one is free and open-source).

Also I know HTML is not as flexible as PDF but it might be good enough. I was doing some tests with real users and they actually like it because not only they can now print anything to PDF (even beyond my app), also their workflow is faster because they don’t have to download and wait until their pdf reader opens up. they just print (or export to pdf) what they see on website directly from their webbrowser… kind of makes sense.