PDFSharp | NET Standard 2.0 library | Document Editor library

I gave up on HTMLRenderer and PDFSharp and solved all my issues with TuesPechkin, a wrapper for wkhtmltopdf.

In order to make the values visible, I've inserted.

If you check the documentation for Documents.Open there is no mentioning of opening a document directly from a stream. This is unfortunately an all to common problem in libraries. But there might be other libraries you could use that allow this.

I would not expect saving to a file to be a major performance issue since the conversion will probably be the dominating factor. But it might cause permission issues if your program is running in a very restrictive environment.

If you are keeping the file save method you should add some exception handling to ensure the temporary files are deleted even if an exception occurs. I have also seen issues where external programs release the file locks after some time, so it might be useful to try to delete the file multiple times.

XImage.FromFile(inputFilePath) specifies the default quality level of 75.

If instead you call ImageSource.FromFile (passing in the quality level) then XImage.FromImageSource then you can increase the quality level.

The image is unlikely to look exactly the same - but bumping it up to 85 or 90 will likely improve its rendering.

I have come across free libraries like SelectPDF, WKHTMLTOPDF, PDFSharp but quiet frankly the samples are pre- asp.net core and cannot quiet integrate it with asp.net core Razor Pages.

I suggest that you could use client side library.Because what you metioned are all server side libraries,they all need to find the view and convert to string.As far as I known,it seems no such direct method to convert razor pages to string.So I suggest that you could use jsPDF library.

Here is a whole working demo:

You have to use PdfString from PDFSharp library like this document.AcroForm.Elements.SetValue("/FieldName", new PdfString("yourstring"));

You also need this if you are attempting to populate PDF form fields, you also need to set the NeedsAppearances element to true. Otherwise, the PDF will "hide" the values on the form.

I have this working now, so I just wanted to place my results here since it is already posted.

My initial problem was that I mistakenly thought the PDFSharp.dll was causing the issue, but it was actually another group of 3rd Party dlls I was referencing.

I tried for hours to get iLMerge to work with the only success being it would kick out a single .exe file but it would have runtime errors.

Errors that I encountered:

Error: Unresolved assembly reference not allowed: Custom.Assembly.

Solution: Reference the assembly if possible. If you have many, you can reference a folder with the /lib:"C:\folderpath" switch.

Error: Unresolved assembly reference not allowed: ADotNetFramework.dll.

Solution: You can reference the desired .Net Framework path where iLMerge will search for missing references. Example: /targetplatform:"v4,C:.NETFramework\v4.8"

Error: The assembly 'xyz.dll' was not merged in correctly. It is still listed as an external reference in the target assembly.

Solution: You can get past this error with the /closed switch. However, I don't think I should even have gotten this error because 'xyz.dll' was a referenced dll to be combined.

Also - use the /log switch, it is extremely helpful in seeing exactly what iLMerge is doing and figuring out your issue. Example: /log:mylog.txt

This allowed me to see that iLMerge was finding duplicate namespaces, in the 3rd Party assemblies and automatically renaming them. Here is an example from my log:

Merging assembly 'My.Assembly.Name' into target assembly. Duplicate type name: modifying name of the type '<>f__AnonymousType02' (from assembly 'My.Assembly.Name') to 'My.Assembly.Name.<>f__AnonymousType02' Duplicate type name: modifying name of the type '<>f__AnonymousType12' (from assembly 'My.Assembly.Name') to 'My.Assembly.Name.<>f__AnonymousType12' Duplicate type name: modifying name of the type '' (from assembly 'My.Assembly.Name') to 'My.Assembly.Name.

Finally - the solution that I found was not to use iLMerge. I found this Answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40786196/2596309 which used Costura.Fody I installed the nuget package with:

Mixing MigraDoc and PDFsharp you can get it done.

You can add a Tag to the paragraphs that you want to link. While the created PDF and the MigraDoc document are still open, you can combine the PDFs and add the links. In PDFsharp you specify the rectangle you want to turn into a link. If you want a special look for the links, you have to set the look in MigraDoc already.

Finding the tagged paragraphs in the document to add the links is tricky and I don't have a sample at hand.
Here is code that adds the pages one by one: https://forum.pdfsharp.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3172
Add the links after adding each MigraDoc page with the table of contents. See this post on the PDFsharp forum to get started:
https://forum.pdfsharp.net/viewtopic.php?p=9694#p9694

MigraDoc can add pages from PDF files using AddImage. You pass the desired page number (zero-based) after the filename - "test.pdf#5" will take the fifth page from that PDF file.

You can simply add a page break to a section, add the image, then add another page break. Images can be positioned at absolute positions, so they fill the whole page.

Automatic page breaks are added when rendering a document to PDF, but you can always add manual page breaks as needed.

If you use that approach then all pages will be created by MigraDoc and page numbers will work.