What's the best third party assembly to merge and compress PDF files for .NET?

Question

I've tried PDFSharp but they are having issues with the latest versions of Acrobat Reader.

Does anyone know the best ones out there that are free?

I'm coding in C#.

Answer 1

Docotic.Pdf library easily merges PDF files.

Here is a sample that shows how to merge a number of PDFs into one.

using (PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument())
{
    string[] filesToMerge = ...
    foreach (string file in filesToMerge)
        pdf.Append(file);

    // delete the first (automatically inserted) page
    pdf.RemovePage(0);

    // document gets saved compressed by default
    // you can compress it even more if you set following options to true

    //pdf.SaveOptions.RemoveUnusedObjects = true;
    //pdf.SaveOptions.UseObjectStreams = true;

    pdf.Save("merged.pdf");
}

Disclaimer: I work for the vendor of the library.

Answer 2

While not free .. have a look at Aspose, they have decent components and are good on support. I've used them on several projects, mainly their Word offering, but did get a chance to use the PDF component they have and it was easy enough to work with.

Answer 3

Maybe you can try with Amyuni PDF Creator .net

The Append method allows you to concatenate or insert pages of one PDF file into another.
The Merge method allows you to draw pages of one PDF file on top of the pages of another file.

All PDF files will be saved with compression by default.

Usual disclaimer applies

Answer 4

Scroll down for the answer here:

Merging multiple PDFs using iTextSharp in c#.net

iTextSharp is the way to go!!