HTML from Database to PDF - html

Question

I need to generate pdf from html dynamically using asp.net. HTML is stored in database. HTML has tables and css, upto 10 pages. I have tried iTextSharp by directly passing html, it produces pdf which is not opening. Destination pdf.codeplex.com has no documentation, it produces PDF with styles from parent page.
Any other solution will be helpful.

Answer 1

I've tried many HTML to PDF solutions including iTextSharp, wkhtmltopdf and ABCpdf (paid)
I'm currently settled on PhantomJS a headless, open-source, WebKit-based browser. It is scriptable with a javascript API which is reasonably well documented.
The only disadvantage I found was that attempting to use stdin to pass HTML into the process was unsuccessful because the REPL still has some bugs. I also found that using stdout seemed to be a lot slower than simply allowing the process to write to disk.
The code below avoids stdin and stdout by creating the javascript input as a temp file, executing PhantomJS, copying the output file to a MemoryStream and cleaning up the temporary files at the end.
using System.IO;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Diagnostics;
public Stream HTMLtoPDF (string html, Size pageSize) {
string path = "C:\\dev\\";
string inputFileName = "tmp.js";
string outputFileName = "tmp.pdf";
StringBuilder input = new StringBuilder();
input.Append("var page = require('webpage').create();");
input.Append(String.Format("page.viewportSize = {{ width: {0}, height: {1} }};", pageSize.Width, pageSize.Height));
input.Append("page.paperSize = { format: 'Letter', orientation: 'portrait', margin: '1cm' };");
input.Append("page.onLoadFinished = function() {");
input.Append(String.Format("page.render('{0}');", outputFileName));
input.Append("phantom.exit();");
input.Append("};");
// html is being passed into a string literal so make sure any double quotes are properly escaped
input.Append("page.content = \"" + html.Replace("\"", "\\\"") + "\";");
File.WriteAllText(path + inputFileName, input.ToString());
Process p;
ProcessStartInfo psi = new ProcessStartInfo();
psi.FileName = path + "phantomjs.exe";
psi.Arguments = inputFileName;
psi.WorkingDirectory = Path.GetDirectoryName(psi.FileName);
psi.UseShellExecute = false;
psi.CreateNoWindow = true;
p = Process.Start(psi);
p.WaitForExit(10000);
Stream strOut = new MemoryStream();
Stream fileStream = File.OpenRead(path + outputFileName);
fileStream.CopyTo(strOut);
fileStream.Close();
strOut.Position = 0;
File.Delete(path + inputFileName);
File.Delete(path + outputFileName);
return strOut;
}