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
I highly recommend NReco, seriously. It has the free and paid version, and really worth it. It uses wkhtmtopdf in background, but you just need one assembly. Fantastic.
Example of use:
Install via NuGet.
var htmlContent = String.Format("<body>Hello world: {0}</body>", DateTime.Now);
var pdfBytes = (new NReco.PdfGenerator.HtmlToPdfConverter()).GeneratePdf(htmlContent);
Disclaimer: I'm not the developer, just a fan of the project :)
I'm the author of the Rotativa package. It allows to create PDF files directly from razor views:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Rotativa/
Trivial to use and you have full control on the layout since you can use razor views with data from your Model and ViewBag container.
I developed a SaaS version on Azure. It makes it even easier to use it from WebApi or any .Net app, service, Azure website, Azure webjob, whatever runs .Net.
http://www.rotativahq.com/
Free accounts available.
It depends on any other requirements you have.
A really simple but not easily deployable solution is to use a WebBrowser control to load the Html and then using the Print method printing to a locally installed PDF printer. There are several free PDF printers available and the WebBrowser control is a part of the .Net framework.
EDIT: If you Html is XHtml you can use PDFizer to do the job.
Below is an example of converting html + css to PDF using iTextSharp (iTextSharp + itextsharp.xmlworker)
using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.tool.xml;
byte[] pdf; // result will be here
var cssText = File.ReadAllText(MapPath("~/css/test.css"));
var html = File.ReadAllText(MapPath("~/css/test.html"));
using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
var document = new Document(PageSize.A4, 50, 50, 60, 60);
var writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, memoryStream);
document.Open();
using (var cssMemoryStream = new MemoryStream(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(cssText)))
{
using (var htmlMemoryStream = new MemoryStream(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(html)))
{
XMLWorkerHelper.GetInstance().ParseXHtml(writer, document, htmlMemoryStream, cssMemoryStream);
}
}
document.Close();
pdf = memoryStream.ToArray();
}
There's also a new web-based document generation app - DocRaptor.com. Seems easy to use, and there's a free option.
There are good news for HTML-to-PDF demands. As this answer showed, the W3C standard css-break-3 will solve the problem... It is a Candidate Recommendation with plan to turn into definitive Recommendation in 2017 or 2018, after tests.
As not-so-standard there are solutions, with plugins for C#, as showed by print-css.rocks.