richyrich

As part of a project I'm working on, I have the need to generate PDF documents "on the fly" and then render them back to the browser.

I was already aware of a dll module that provided this functionality, available at iTextSharp | Get iTextSharp at SourceForge.net so I thought I'd post a quick blog about how to get it working.

Firstly, you need to place the .dll file in the bin directory of your application / website.

I then created a new .aspx page, the content of which was just

Code:

<%@ Page Language="C#" CodeFile="invoicepdf.aspx.cs" Inherits="_invoicepdf" %>

The code behind was like this:-

Code:

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.IO;
using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;

public partial class _invoicepdf : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
       // Create instance of a new document
        Document doc = new Document(PageSize.A4, 10, 10, 50, 50);
       // Change the content type to application/pdf !Important
       HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "application/pdf";
       // Get Instance of pdfWriter to be able to create the document in the OutputStream
        PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, HttpContext.Current.Response.OutputStream);
       // Open the document to be able to write to it
        doc.Open();
       // Create a simple paragraph to add to the document
        Paragraph para = new Paragraph("This is a paragraph");
      // Add the paragraph to the document
        doc.Add(para);
      // Close the document, rendering it to the browser
        doc.Close();
    }
}

Text can be added to the PDF using a variety of methods. They include:-
Chunk
Paragraph
Phrase

You can also apply fonts and styles to an instance of each of these objects to use italics, underline etc.