Convert HTML to PDF in .NET

Question

I want to generate a PDF by passing HTML contents to a function. I have made use of iTextSharp for this but it does not perform well when it encounters tables and the layout

Answer 1

It seems like so far the best free .NET solution is the TuesPechkin library which is a wrapper around the wkhtmltopdf native library.

I've now used the single-threaded version to convert a few thousand HTML strings to PDF files and it seems to work great. It's supposed to also work in multi-threaded environments (IIS, for example) but I haven't tested that.

Also since I wanted to use the latest version of wkhtmltopdf (0.12.5 at the time of writing), I downloaded the DLL from the official website, copied it to my project root, set copy to output to true, and initialized the library like so:

var dllDir = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory;
Converter = new StandardConverter(new PdfToolset(new StaticDeployment(dllDir)));

Above code will look exactly for "wkhtmltox.dll", so don't rename the file. I used the 64-bit version of the DLL.

Make sure you read the instructions for multi-threaded environments, as you will have to initialize it only once per app lifecycle so you'll need to put it in a singleton or something.