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By Chandra Kudumula
This article is about generating PDF documents using C#, .NET, and the iText library. I had a requirement to generate an invoice as a PDF document for one of the projects I worked on. In my research, I came to know about iText. iText is a library for creating and manipulating PDF files in .NET and Java. If you are struggling with C#, consider checking out the TechRepublic Academy.
In Visual Studio, go to File -> New -> Project.
On the “New Project window”, select the Console App(.NET Framework) and give the project a name, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Selecting the Console App(.NET Framework)
Right-click the project name and select “Manage NuGet Packages…”. You can see this in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Selecting NuGet Packages
Select “Browse” and, in the search box, type itext7 and select itext7 from the searched results and install (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Selecting itext7
Following are the helpful classes and methods to generate the PDF document:
I will add a Header, SubHeader, Line Separator, Image, Table, Hyperlink, and finally page numbers to the PDF document.
Add a header to the PDF document. Header Content is center aligned to the document and I set the font size to 20. We can achieve this by creating a paragraph object. Following is the code snippet to create a paragraph object and add it to the document object. Finally, we need to close the document object by calling the Close() method.
using iText.Kernel.Pdf; using iText.Layout; using iText.Layout.Element; using iText.Layout.Properties; namespace GeneratePdfDemo < class Program < static void Main(string[] args) < // Must have write permissions to the path folder PdfWriter writer = new PdfWriter("C:\\demo.pdf"); PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument(writer); Document document = new Document(pdf); Paragraph header = new paragraph("HEADER") .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .SetFontSize(20); document.Add(header); document.Close(); >> >
Run the program and go to the path specified in PdfWriter and open the PDF document. Figure 4 is the image of a PDF document with header text.
Figure 4: Showing the header text
Create a Sub Header with text alignment center and set the font size to 15. Add this Sub Header to the document object, as shown in Figure 5.
Paragraph subheader = new Paragraph("SUB HEADER") .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .SetFontSize(15); document.Add(subheader);
Figure 5: Creating the Sub Header
Add a horizontal line using Line Separator. This is shown in Figure 6.
// Line separator LineSeparator ls = new LineSeparator(new SolidLine()); document.Add(ls);
Figure 6: Creating the separator line
Add an Image to the PDF document by using an Image instance (see Figure 7).
// Add image Image img = new Image(ImageDataFactory .Create(@"..\..\image.jpg")) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER); document.Add(img);
Figure 7: Adding an image
Create a Table and add it to the document, as shown in Figure 8.
// Table Table table = new Table(2, false); Cell cell11 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("State")); Cell cell12 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Capital")); Cell cell21 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("New York")); Cell cell22 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Albany")); Cell cell31 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("New Jersey")); Cell cell32 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Trenton")); Cell cell41 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("California")); Cell cell42 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Sacramento")); table.AddCell(cell11); table.AddCell(cell12); table.AddCell(cell21); table.AddCell(cell22); table.AddCell(cell31); table.AddCell(cell32); table.AddCell(cell41); table.AddCell(cell42); document.Add(table);
Figure 8: Adding a table
Create a Hyperlink and add it to the document (see Figure 9).
// Hyper link Link link = new Link("click here", PdfAction.CreateURI("https://www.google.com")); Paragraph hyperLink = new Paragraph("Please ") .Add(link.SetBold().SetUnderline() .SetItalic().SetFontColor(ColorConstants.BLUE)) .Add(" to go www.google.com."); document.Add(newline); document.Add(hyperLink);
Figure 9: Adding a hyperlink
Add Page numbers at the top right corner of the page, as shown in Figure 10.
// Page numbers int n = pdf.GetNumberOfPages(); for (int i = 1; i
Figure 10: Adding page numbers
Following is the complete code listing.
using iText.IO.Image; using iText.Kernel.Colors; using iText.Kernel.Pdf; using iText.Kernel.Pdf.Action; using iText.Kernel.Pdf.Canvas.Draw; using iText.Layout; using iText.Layout.Element; using iText.Layout.Properties; using System; namespace GeneratePdfDemo < class Program < static void Main(string[] args) < // Must have write permissions to the path folder PdfWriter writer = new PdfWriter("C:\\test\\demo.pdf"); PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument(writer); Document document = new Document(pdf); // Header Paragraph header = new Paragraph("HEADER") .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .SetFontSize(20); // New line Paragraph newline = new Paragraph(new Text("\n")); document.Add(newline); document.Add(header); // Add sub-header Paragraph subheader = new Paragraph("SUB HEADER") .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .SetFontSize(15); document.Add(subheader); // Line separator LineSeparator ls = new LineSeparator(new SolidLine()); document.Add(ls); // Add paragraph1 Paragraph paragraph1 = new Paragraph("Lorem ipsum " + "dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, " + "sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore " + "et dolore magna aliqua."); document.Add(paragraph1); // Add image Image img = new Image(ImageDataFactory .Create(@"..\..\image.jpg")) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER); document.Add(img); // Table Table table = new Table(2, false); Cell cell11 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("State")); Cell cell12 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Capital")); Cell cell21 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("New York")); Cell cell22 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Albany")); Cell cell31 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("New Jersey")); Cell cell32 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Trenton")); Cell cell41 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("California")); Cell cell42 = new Cell(1, 1) .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER) .Add(new Paragraph("Sacramento")); table.AddCell(cell11); table.AddCell(cell12); table.AddCell(cell21); table.AddCell(cell22); table.AddCell(cell31); table.AddCell(cell32); table.AddCell(cell41); table.AddCell(cell42); document.Add(newline); document.Add(table); // Hyper link Link link = new Link("click here", PdfAction.CreateURI("https://www.google.com")); Paragraph hyperLink = new Paragraph("Please ") .Add(link.SetBold().SetUnderline() .SetItalic().SetFontColor(ColorConstants.BLUE)) .Add(" to go www.google.com."); document.Add(newline); document.Add(hyperLink); // Page numbers int n = pdf.GetNumberOfPages(); for (int i = 1; i // Close document document.Close(); > > >
You have seen how to generate the PDF document by using C#, .NET, and the iText library. iText allows lot of customization to PDF documents. I hope this article will help someone who wants to generate PDF documents.
