I’ve been having a heckuva time with this problem, and there seems to be a lot of noise out there in search engines in getting to the bottom of it, so forgive me if I’ve missed a silver bullet out there.
The base need is that I have to generate a PDF document that has both static and dynamic elements. I started to do this by having a PDF template with all the static content, and then I wanted to inject various dynamic elements into it. The problem is that PDFs are not meant to be manipulated that way, and depending on the size of the dynamic text I put in there, might overflow text on other pages. I was using iTextSharp but can’t get past this problem.
A possible fallback is to generate a DOCX, which I’ve done before, and then convert it into a PDF on the backend. The only libraries I’ve found to do this are paid apps (like Aspose). There are examples out there that convert to PDF without these libraries, but they seem to require a client-side application. I’m doing this via IIS.
To make a long story longer…are there free libraries that will convert a DOCX file to a PDF server-side without launching client applications to do so?
There are a few choices here:
build a COM interop class that will perform read and ‘Save As’ functions on your .docx. The MSDN link you gave doesn’t require to be run client-side, but rather have the Office assemblies in the GAC or in your ASP.NET’s bin directory.
buy a third party component to do the work for you. Here’s just one example with no guarantees.