ITextSharp HTML to PDF?

after doing some digging I found a good way to accomplish what I need with ITextSharp.

Here is some sample code if it will help anyone else in the future:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Document document = new Document();
    try
    {
        PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, new FileStream("c:\\my.pdf", FileMode.Create));
        document.Open();
        WebClient wc = new WebClient();
        string htmlText = wc.DownloadString("http://localhost:59500/my.html");
        Response.Write(htmlText);
        List<IElement> htmlarraylist = HTMLWorker.ParseToList(new StringReader(htmlText), null);
        for (int k = 0; k < htmlarraylist.Count; k++)
        {
            document.Add((IElement)htmlarraylist[k]);
        }

        document.Close();
    }
    catch
    {
    }
}

I came across the same question a few weeks ago and this is the result from what I found. This method does a quick dump of HTML to a PDF. The document will most likely need some format tweaking.

private MemoryStream createPDF(string html)
{
    MemoryStream msOutput = new MemoryStream();
    TextReader reader = new StringReader(html);

    // step 1: creation of a document-object
    Document document = new Document(PageSize.A4, 30, 30, 30, 30);

    // step 2:
    // we create a writer that listens to the document
    // and directs a XML-stream to a file
    PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, msOutput);

    // step 3: we create a worker parse the document
    HTMLWorker worker = new HTMLWorker(document);

    // step 4: we open document and start the worker on the document
    document.Open();
    worker.StartDocument();

    // step 5: parse the html into the document
    worker.Parse(reader);

    // step 6: close the document and the worker
    worker.EndDocument();
    worker.Close();
    document.Close();

    return msOutput;
}

I would one-up'd mightymada's answer if I had the reputation - I just implemented an asp.net HTML to PDF solution using Pechkin. results are wonderful.

There is a nuget package for Pechkin, but as the above poster mentions in his blog (http://codeutil.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/convert-html-to-pdf/ - I hope she doesn't mind me reposting it), there's a memory leak that's been fixed in this branch:

https://github.com/tuespetre/Pechkin

The above blog has specific instructions for how to include this package (it's a 32 bit dll and requires .net4). here is my code. The incoming HTML is actually assembled via HTML Agility pack (I'm automating invoice generations):

public static byte[] PechkinPdf(string html)
{
  //Transform the HTML into PDF
  var pechkin = Factory.Create(new GlobalConfig());
  var pdf = pechkin.Convert(new ObjectConfig()
                          .SetLoadImages(true).SetZoomFactor(1.5)
                          .SetPrintBackground(true)
                          .SetScreenMediaType(true)
                          .SetCreateExternalLinks(true), html);

  //Return the PDF file
  return pdf;
}

again, thank you mightymada - your answer is fantastic.


Here's what I was able to get working on version 5.4.2 (from the nuget install) to return a pdf response from an asp.net mvc controller. It could be modfied to use a FileStream instead of MemoryStream for the output if that's what is needed.

I post it here because it is a complete example of current iTextSharp usage for the html -> pdf conversion (disregarding images, I haven't looked at that since my usage doesn't require it)

It uses iTextSharp's XmlWorkerHelper, so the incoming hmtl must be valid XHTML, so you may need to do some fixup depending on your input.

using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.tool.xml;
using System.IO;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace Sample.Web.Controllers
{
    public class PdfConverterController : Controller
    {
        [ValidateInput(false)]
        [HttpPost]
        public ActionResult HtmlToPdf(string html)
        {           

            html = @"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""UTF-8""?>
                 <!DOCTYPE html 
                     PUBLIC ""-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN""
                    ""http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"">
                 <html xmlns=""http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"" xml:lang=""en"" lang=""en"">
                    <head>
                        <title>Minimal XHTML 1.0 Document with W3C DTD</title>
                    </head>
                  <body>
                    " + html + "</body></html>";

            var bytes = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(html);

            using (var input = new MemoryStream(bytes))
            {
                var output = new MemoryStream(); // this MemoryStream is closed by FileStreamResult

                var document = new iTextSharp.text.Document(iTextSharp.text.PageSize.LETTER, 50, 50, 50, 50);
                var writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, output);
                writer.CloseStream = false;
                document.Open();

                var xmlWorker = XMLWorkerHelper.GetInstance();
                xmlWorker.ParseXHtml(writer, document, input, null);
                document.Close();
                output.Position = 0;

                return new FileStreamResult(output, "application/pdf");
            }
        }
    }
}

Tags:

.Net

Itextsharp

Html To Pdf

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