help with creating pdf's on the fly.

davetherave2 · 11 Jun 2009 at 15:04

I am currently trying to create an aspx site that is capable of generating pdf documents based on text entered into a website.

I am currently using fckeditor to allow text and images to be entered and then using iTextSharp to convert the html generate into a pdf document.

Now this does work but it doesn't seem to be applying any styling that I set within the html and positioning of images is all over the place.

Has anyone done anything like this before and if so are there better solutions. Ideally I would like a free solution but if I need to pay for something that can do it easily then that is an option I will consider.

edit:

I did try using pdf templates but these didn't quite work for me. They were a little to limiting in what I wanted to achieve.

Cuchulain · 11 Jun 2009 at 15:06

I remember trying to do this with PHP and some PDF libraries, it was a bloody nightmare as the styling is completely different to CSS, everything had to be positioned using co-ordinates etc. I ended up giving up on it.

davetherave2 · 11 Jun 2009 at 17:02

As I see it at the moment the only viable solution is to save the html pages display them and then get the user to convert to pdf so that it retains styling and image positions.

Not the ideal solution but it may be the only one that will work effectively.

Pho · 11 Jun 2009 at 17:28

What about the report controls in Visual Studio?

Alternatively, if you have Crystal Reports then that definately exports to PDF (from within aspx)

davetherave2 · 11 Jun 2009 at 21:14

I don't think that will work for my solution.

Basically I will have users entering in documents that will be reviewed and then approved or denied to be published. They will be using vairous templates that will be approved prior to any data being added containing different requirement and then sent off to be published into brochures.

Pho · 11 Jun 2009 at 21:27

If you store all the data in a database then you can quite easily turn it into a report then into PDF, provided you have a reasonably decent database structure for your data.

PMWD · 11 Jun 2009 at 23:44

I've used http://www.fpdf.org/ for php creation of PDFs, it's pretty decent once you get your head around it, I put all my accounts online with the ability to output PDFs for print, works really well.