Generate a business letter for 100+ leads using wkhtmltopdf

Question

We need to print Business Letter for a given list with mail merge facilities.

My client is not willing to spend $$ on a paid ASP.NET control to make PDF. So I opted in for WKHTMLtoPDF and it works fine for us until one day the client tried to get a PDF of 100+ leads, resulting in complete failure of PDF generation. It works just fine with a 10-20 page PDF, but not for 100.

Are there any tips & tricks to improve performance? We are using Cloud-hosted IIS 7 with ASP.NET 4 if that matters.

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 26 '16 at 12:53

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PDFSharp library is really a nice one!

I have used it for quite a while now, and I find it flexible enough to fulfill your needs.

However there are some aspects of using it as a "standalone library" - e.g creating tables is a headache and there aren't much text formatting options. It is much better to mix it together with MigraDoc (an extension library for PDFSharp).

answered Feb 26 '16 at 12:53

Leo Kolezhuk

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Well, latest version of wkhtmltopdf is much improved and is best as it take a simple HTML and do the job. PDFSharp is good, but is complicated when compare to wkhtmltopdf. But thanks for your link it looks good. – Sumit Gupta Feb 26 '16 at 14:58

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

If you're looking for a really free (as in "free of worries") library, choose iTextPDF versions prior to version 4.1.7, as they state in the ByteScout blog.

From the ByteScout blog:

iTextSharp 4.1.6 DLL only: itextsharp-4.1.6-dll.zip
iTextSharp 4.1.6 Source Code (C#): itextsharp-4.1.6.zip

I'm not sure I understand your problem but couldn't you generate docx documents and get the same results?

Sumit Gupta · Answer 3 · 2017-10-14T11:52:26.050

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For all, I use http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ to create HTML to PDF, my ASP.NET code generate the HtML file then I create HTML to PDF and it is done, much easier than using itextpdf's Table and td structure to get things in better space. I found it easy and fast once you get your stuff aligned properly.

library has improved since original question asked and it performs better now.

edited Oct 14 '17 at 11:52

answered Oct 26 '12 at 17:56

Sumit Gupta

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the OP indicated that this library is not good for the size of files his client is trying to generate. – Jason D Jan 20 '13 at 18:38
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Also it does not exist anymore – Dylan Czenski Mar 02 '16 at 21:32
I recently use puppeteer from nodejs, and it produce some good results as well. – Sumit Gupta May 18 '20 at 05:23

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered May 22 '12 at 17:08

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here is good tutorial http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/20640/Creating-PDF-Documents-in-ASP-NET

answered May 22 '12 at 17:08

Nurlan

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itextSharp is paid thing for commercial usage, and as I said client is not ready to pay their very high price. – Sumit Gupta May 22 '12 at 17:11
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iTextSharp is also available for free under the AGPL, with the only condition that your code will be under AGPL too. – Alexis Pigeon May 23 '12 at 07:48

Generate a business letter for 100+ leads using wkhtmltopdf

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