what's a good enterprise level pdf generation solution?

Question

I'd like to find a replacement for Crystal Reports. Oh how I dislike CR.

Ideally I'd like to find a PDF generation tool that has the following:

• Solid API in .NET
• Speed: we'd like to generate 1000-2500 pdfs per day
• WYSIWYG editor
• hotlinking of image files (logos)
• good widow/orphan control
• reasonably good typography control (kerning)
• repeatable fields (like you'd see in a bank statement)
• easy to push data in from xml data, datasets or direct sql queries
• size: final size of the pdf files matters because these will go in a database eventually
• price: free is not always a good price; paying for the right solution is far better than paying developers to build the right solution from an almost-right solution

The WYSIWYG editor is especially important. I'd prefer to be able to hand a tool to my designer-ish person, have them build the document and place the database fields where they are supposed to be, then hand it back to me so I can link it up to the database.

Similar to this question, but I felt that question was too vague

Answer 1

The WYSIWYG editor is especially important.

I would recommend CxReports here.

The visual editor allows the creation of very sophisticated reports. All other requirements are supported too.

Answer 2

Prince XML (http://www.princexml.com/) and ABCPdf.net (http://websupergoo.com/linktous.htm) will both do this. Personally I prefer ABCPDF as it is a managed .Net component not an iffy .exe wrapped up. WMD editor for the content.

Answer 3

JasperReports doesn't do what you want?

(If your reports contains always the same type of data, you could use iText(Sharp). You spend some time tuning the design by code - tedious, i know -, but afterwards it's only a matter of importing data)

Answer 4

DevExpress XtraReports do fantastic report generation, savable in pdf obviously. I use it to generate Medical reports in one of the programs that I work on. You can build the reports programmatically or via their design time GUI (They also have an end user GUI that lets reports be created/edited).

http://devexpress.com/Products/NET/Reporting/

Answer 5

I can't remember or not if iTextSharp supports it or not, but I'm sure it had/has a feature for taking a HTML representation and producing a PDF from that. If what you want is power, cost-benefit with a WYSIWYG interface, you can't really go past your favourite IDE for designing a HTML page, and outputing that in PDF format from a library.

Answer 6

Please, try to find a way how to use functional of this office extension.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en

Answer 7

iTextSharp, very powerful & gaining popularity. I have used it in the past & recommend it. It's opensource, has great features like merge fields etc, can be used in reports.

Answer 8

Since you are in Windows then SQL Server Reporting Services is great and free with SQL Server. You can do the WYSIWYG in Visual Studio or the stand-alone design tool and it creates PDF along with other types of reports like Excel.

Once the report is designed it is just an XML file that resides on the Reporting Server and is called in your C# application with either SOAP or URL.

Chances are you already have everything you need to use it.

Answer 9

I think you have two different things here:

1. A PDF editor. Might as well go with Acrobat.
2. PDF server technology. This really depends on what the rest of your stack looks like but we use PDFSharp successfully. If your not doing that much manipulation or it's more generic, I think Adobe makes "Adobe Distiller Server". You should look at both.