I’m working with an asp.net application that produces large PDF documents from HTML. The content is perhaps complex (detailed grid type listings, css styled, running to 40+ pages) compared to typical usage. None of the libraries we’ve tried are performing adequately. Typically a 40 page document is taking upwards of a minute to render on a powerful multi-core machine.
We are able to decouple the generation from the web application and also pre-generate documents in some cases. Still, the frequency with which content changes requires a faster solution.
So, does anyone have experience of a PDF generation component that can output a content heavy 40 page document in seconds rather than minutes? Or are our expectations unrealistic?
NB: I’d rather not “out” the poorly performing components here as we are seeking support from vendors to make improvements. I’ve reviewed previously questions posted on StackOverflow and none appear to deal with this type or size of document.
An option might be to not convert html to PDF and take another approach. We use the ActiveReports reporting tool that generates PDF, its pretty powerful when using sub-reports for multi-dataset reports, and completely integrates with visual studio.
This means that you would need to rebuild the report to produce the same data that you see on-screen. This is sometimes not such a bad thing as you can style up the report specifically for printing.
PDFs can be generated via a back-end service and/or emailed or produced on the fly to the browser.