How to generate PDF without using any third party tool (like syncfusion, apitron etc.)

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C#

How to generate PDF without using any third party tool (like Syncfusion, Apitron etc.)

What I have tried:

How to generate PDF without using any third party tool (like Syncfusion, Apitron etc.)

Posted 4-May-16 20:57pm

surajemo

Updated 4-May-16 21:27pm

Pete O'Hanlon

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 5-May-16 3:10am

"What I have tried" filled with something unrelated to showing what you have tried.
—SA

Pete O'Hanlon 5-May-16 3:12am

As a general rule, just restating your question in the What I have tried section is a bad idea. That doesn't tell us what you've tried, it tells us the opposite - it says you haven't tried anything.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 5-May-16 3:35am

Well, "I did not try anything" would still be better than asking a question in this section or repeating something.

It looks like the apparently right idea of adding this section to the question submission form has failed. Amazingly, even the members who actually show some relevant code samples write them elsewhere, not in this section. I would not expect such behavior if someone asked me to predict what could have happened. :-)

—SA

Pete O'Hanlon 5-May-16 3:38am

I have to admit, I've rarely seen a worthwhile entry in this section.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 5-May-16 3:41am

Very rarely. Human psychology is even more of a mystery than I thought before. :-)
—SA

2 solutions

Solution 2

No problem at all. If you really determined to avoid using any 3rd-party tool, you can always develop a 1st-party tool, because full standard is published under ISO 32000-1:2008. Unfortunately, obtaining the copy of the document is not free of charge.

You can also obtain the description of the standard from Adobe site. In particular, please see http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf[^].

For further detail and good collection of references, please see:
Portable Document Format — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[^].

Can you do this work? I doubt it. Nevertheless, there is a good bunch of 3rd-party PDF tools, so a number of teams successfully solved such problems (and the usability of good 3rd-party PDF viewers much better then dreaded Adobe). Anyway, be realistic and carefully examine the feasibility of such project. :-)

—SA

Posted 4-May-16 21:27pm

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Comments

Pete O'Hanlon 5-May-16 3:43am

My 5.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 5-May-16 3:45am

Than you, Pete.
—SA

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Pete O'Hanlon · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-04T21:10:00

If you want to save the file without using a 3rd party tool, you are going to have to write code that matches the PDF specification[^]. This is not a trivial task - as you can see, the 1.7 spec runs to 756 pages.

If you are just trying to avoid the cost of purchasing a PDF generation tool, there are some open source[^] ones that you could try. While I use the paid Syncfusion version now, I have had a lot of success with PDFSharp[^], iTextSharp[^] (although you have to be careful what you install with this one as Sourceforge does seem to like to add a lot of rubbish) and Sharp PDF[^].