Cannot apply CSS to the html string

Question

I am trying to integrate evoPDF on my asp.net app. I am sending part of html from my html file onclick through ajax. Everything works fie till this part. Now, when I invoke these methods from EvoPdf API.

 1. GetPdfBytesFromHtmlStream(Stream, Encoding,urlbase)

 2. SavePdfFromHtmlStringToFile(String html,string filename,urlbase)

My html chunk I am sending is something like

 <ol class = "lol">
         <li> HEY </li>
         <li> Now </li>

  </ol>

The Css which is in the external file is something like

 .lol {

      background-color: red;

  }

According to the documentation the third argument must be the full url of the originial Html where you extracted the chunk of the html. I uploaded my app in the web since trying localhost/3232 didn't work. But, I can't see any CSS being applied in the generated Html. In the documentation they also recommended to append

       <HEAD> <BASE HREF="full url to your html file"> </HEAD>

And, use this method.

        pdfConverter.GetPdfBytesFromHtmlString(String html);

Nothing I tried above applies CSS. Any thoughts....

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37392418/even-after-providing-fully-qualified-url-in-the-html-string-evopdf-converter-is guys can u give a proper answer to my question — aggy, May 23 '16 at 14:04

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 06 '13 at 14:15

3

While it's possible to have the html in an external file with evoPDF, I don't recommend it. Instead just inline the styles in the head of the document. When we were setting up the PDF generator for Careers 2.0, I remember that the urls had to be live urls, behind a web server, not just relative link in the same directory structure. There is also a timeout in evo pdf that can cause loss of images if loading takes too long, which also plays nicer with inline everything.

I also recommend passing it fully valid html, not just the snippets you need to generate the view. Behind the scenes (in our version of evoPDF at least), it's just hoisting a browser instance and taking a screenshot. They render a little differently depending on the doctype.

answered Aug 06 '13 at 14:15

Nick Larsen

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Yes you are right about the inline css. I am a developer at a college. I am not writing Evopdf for one app. But for all the apps that run in the college. It should do 2 things. 1 changes the whole url html to Pdf and another change part of the html to pdf. So, that's why I didn't want to only support for inline citation, since I don't know what to expect from all the other apps. I also tried, the uploading to the live url and invoking the css . Still No CSS – Rabin Aug 06 '13 at 14:22
The only other thing I can think of to suggest without seeing a full example is that the base tag is supposed to point to the folder which is the root for all relative urls. It's not supposed to point to an actual file directly otherwise all relative urls should break. – Nick Larsen Aug 06 '13 at 14:38

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 16 '17 at 00:15

I ran into this issue with EvoPdf. The fix for me was to reference the baseURL from web.config. I was trying to use HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri; which worked in two environments but didn't when tested on another server.

  <appSettings>
    <add key="baseURL" value="http://your-domain.com/" />
  </appSettings>

So you set it specifically and the CSS shows correctly after the change. Works with https too. You can hard code it for testing and not use ConfigurationManager.

        TextWriter outTextWriter = new StringWriter();

        Server.Execute("Page1.aspx", outTextWriter);
        Server.Execute("Page2.html", outTextWriter);

        string htmlStringToConvert = outTextWriter.ToString();
        outTextWriter.Close();

        // Use the current page URL as base URL
        string baseUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["baseURL"].ToString(); //HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri;

        // Convert the page HTML string to a PDF document in a memory buffer
        byte[] outPdfBuffer = htmlToPdfConverter.ConvertHtml(htmlStringToConvert, baseUrl);

Cannot apply CSS to the html string

2 Answers2

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