QuestPDF VS PuppeteerSharp

What is QuestPDF? QuestPDF is an open-source .NET library for PDF document generation. It uses a fluent API approach to compose together many simple elements to create complex documents.

QuestPDF looks really good (I haven't used it) but I believe they changed their license recently.

I used that same library it worked great the only issue I had was the users would often have to manually set the scaling to fit to a page. I'm sure I could've fixed this in other ways if I was more competent with CSS but ended up just switching to use https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF in a backend instead of doing everything in front end.

Give this a try: QuestPDF

I think you should ask these questions in related discussion on Github: https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF/discussions/491

May I introduce you to QuestPDF!

➡️ James Newton-King ♔ on Twitter: "Coming in .NET 8: Route tooling for ASP.NET Core" / Twitter ➡️ Announcing .NET Community Toolkit 8.1 ➡️ Uno Platform 4.7 – New Project Template, Performance Improvements and more ➡️ C# Advent 2022 Awards | Cross Cutting Concerns ➡️ GitHub - QuestPDF ➡️ DNF Summit 2023 ➡️ .NET Frontend Day

Like many have suggested, I also cast my vote on QuestPDF. No more +50MB library including a Chrome browser to render HTML so a PDF of it can be created, which took 2-3 seconds each time. But with QuestPDF, it's so much faster!

Also, the library is open-source, so you can take a look at the exact implementation of the layout engine. It is inspired by Flutter and WPF, though optimized for pageable content: https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF/tree/main/Source/QuestPDF/Elements

PuppeteerSharp

Otherwise, any pdf to hml chromium based solution hosted via docker, like gotenberg](https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg) or browserless.io(which is free if you create open source). Generating pdfs from html directly in .NET was always a pain. Wkhtml (and wrappers that use it) uses WebKit and comes with a load of issues of its own, similar to running and styling anything in Safari. Using chromium based engine saves a lot of time as it's the most popular way of doing it these days. You can also use puppeteer-sharp with local chromium if you host your app on something that allows it(f.e. not Azure Functions).

Puppeteer Sharp is a port of the popular Headless Chrome NodeJS API built by Google. Puppeteer Sharp was written in C# and released in 2017 by Darío Kondratiuk to offer the same functionality to .NET developers.

there is a dotnet package for using headless chrome: https://www.puppeteersharp.com/ its a port of the nodejs package of the same name

For the actual conversion of html to pdf we use PuppeteerSharp (https://www.puppeteersharp.com ) but you need browserless for that, which requires an api key (don’t know the pricing)

The README in the GitHub site has been good enough for me: https://github.com/hardkoded/puppeteer-sharp

Iv'e been using https://github.com/hardkoded/puppeteer-sharp for html to pdf conversion for quite some time with success. (in both .net framework and .net core)

Just generate HTML and use https://github.com/hardkoded/puppeteer-sharp to produce a PDF from headless Chrome.

Another idea is to maybe generate the document as HTML first and then convert the HTML to a PDF (with somehting like PuppeteerSharp. I have found this more flexible in the past, but I have not personally done with with nested tables.