Generate a business letter for 100+ leads using wkhtmltopdf - pdf-generation

We need to print Business Letter for a given list with mail merge facilities.
My client is not willing to spend $$ on a paid ASP.NET control to make PDF. So I opted in for WKHTMLtoPDF and it works fine for us until one day the client tried to get a PDF of 100+ leads, resulting in complete failure of PDF generation. It works just fine with a 10-20 page PDF, but not for 100.
Are there any tips & tricks to improve performance? We are using Cloud-hosted IIS 7 with ASP.NET 4 if that matters.

PDFSharp library is really a nice one!
I have used it for quite a while now, and I find it flexible enough to fulfill your needs.
However there are some aspects of using it as a "standalone library" - e.g creating tables is a headache and there aren't much text formatting options. It is much better to mix it together with MigraDoc (an extension library for PDFSharp).

If you're looking for a really free (as in "free of worries") library, choose iTextPDF versions prior to version 4.1.7, as they state in the ByteScout blog.
From the ByteScout blog:
iTextSharp 4.1.6 DLL only: itextsharp-4.1.6-dll.zip
iTextSharp 4.1.6 Source Code (C#): itextsharp-4.1.6.zip
I'm not sure I understand your problem but couldn't you generate docx documents and get the same results?

For all, I use http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ to create HTML to PDF, my ASP.NET code generate the HtML file then I create HTML to PDF and it is done, much easier than using itextpdf's Table and td structure to get things in better space. I found it easy and fast once you get your stuff aligned properly.
library has improved since original question asked and it performs better now.

here is good tutorial http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/20640/Creating-PDF-Documents-in-ASP-NET

Related

Is there any possibility to generate pdf using Spring 5 without using any tool out of the box?

Jasper report is using iText 2.1.7 for generating PDF and which is valunearability on security scan.
Is there any possibilty to generate pdf using Spring without using any other tool out of spring.
Theoretically yes: you could check the PDF spec and write code that outputs the appropriate bytes.
Practically no: the spec is complicated and real-life experience is required to know all the pitfalls. If it's not your primary business case you really don't want to spend that amount of time and money on creating a basic PDF writer.
iText is that tool for you. Maybe OpenPDF (a fork of the iText code base before it was relicensed) could be an alternative.
Other workarounds are available such as using LibreOffice to create the PDFs for you.
But no matter what approach you pick, there's almost certainly some third-party software invovled.

PDF Manipulation in Expression Engine

I am currently working on a project using the Expression Engine Framework, which as a c# developer is a little alien to me!
I am needing a pdf manipulation plugin for EE so that every PDF a client uploads has their profile's link appearing at the bottom (preferably clickable but not essential). I have had a look around but cannot find anything to help me. There is a watermarker in EE for images but not for PDFs which is annoying.
In C# we have Itextsharp which does the job perfectly - I wonder if I am going to have write a custom EE Extension to do the job for me.
Just wondered if anybody out there has ever had to do something similar and can point me in the right direction.
Many Thanks!
There are many ways to modify PDF's with PHP. See PDF Editing in PHP?
http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/
http://www.fpdf.org/
http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.pdf.html
https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf
These are just libraries, so load one into the application and use it in your controller.

best HTML code sharing app

I've been searching google for a while to determine the most coder-friendly example boxes.
I'm wanting to share varying forms of ECMA script (JS for example) etc that provides the user with color coding and a simple way of copying the code. I know there are several out there, but I wanted to get some opinions from SOF since you guys probably have good experience with code.
so- What's the code-sharing tool you [would] use?
the solution
I ended up using Gist for complete snippets and am using Syntax Highlighter for *incomplete * code samples. There's a Drupal plugin for the Syntax Highlighter, but I dare say it's more of a pain to figure out the plugin than it is to just do things the old fashioned way (old fashioned being like 5 years ago..)
I use http://jsfiddle.net/
Color coding — check
HTML, CSS, JS — check
Live demo — check
gist has syntax highlighting and users can download the files separately, as a zip archive or using git. You can embed the files easily on other sites.
Additionally, the site tracks changes and other users can add comments or fork a gist to change it themselves.

ASP.NET MVC2 Rich Text Editor

basically, my question is pretty much similar and has been asked numerous times. Which WYSIWYG editor is better now that Telerik has released their MVC editor, would it be wise to purchase the entire suite instead?
Selections:
TinyMCE
CKEditor
Telerik MVC Editor
Disclaimer: As part of the Telerik MVC team (and one of the editor developers), my opinion is quite biased, yet I can shed some light on the differences between the editors.
All of them are open source
Despite Todd's answer, the Telerik MVC editor is open-source, under GPLv2 license (with a commercial license available). Our support is well known, so I guess this is where we stand out (though it is paid). On the other hand, both TinyMCE and CKEditor have huge communities, which may help quickly, too.
Different feature set
This has been the first release of the Telerik MVC editor, while CK and TinyMCE have been around the block for a very long time. We have mixed feelings about this -- while we are missing out on quite a few tools/features, we have invested a lot of time in polishing the existing ones (converting list items to headings, pasting from MS Word). Our bet is on cleaner, more robust code (4k LoC vs 14k LoC in TinyMCE without plug-ins).
It depends on your requirements
After all, with the Telerik suite, you get... well... a suite of components with common code and themes. So if you need the dedicated support and the other components and the limited feature set does not make a difference, Telerik would be a nice choice. If you need a full-scale editor and want to bet on more feature-complete products, TinyMCE and CKEditor are the wiser choice.
I hope this helps and does not contain much happy talk.
Some Background:
While there are some very good third-party components for ASP.NET I tend to stay away from them for the open source alternative. The reason goes back to an issue I has with a chart component a few years ago. It had a bug that the company would not fix in the current version and instead wanted us to purchase an upgrade while not guaranteeing that would fix the problem.
They did offer a demo that we could not use in production (which was the only place we were getting the problem) so the problem continued until the component was replaced.
My Answer
From My experience I would recommend going with the open source alternative. I have used CKEditor and TinyMCE with success in PHP projects. CKEditor can be styled nicely and TinyMCE has tons of documentation from the millions of people who use it daily.
The greatest benefit to open source is being able to change the code to meet your needs or fix a problem specific to your environment.
My last ASP.NET MVC app required all components to be open source for the same reason as mentioned above with the end result being more stable than the previous that included some purchased components.
Hope this helps.
Wordpress uses TinyMCE, so I am very familiar with using it (though getting it to look like wordpress is a little bit of an undertaking).
I have successfully implemented TinyMCE into 2 of my Asp.Net MVC websites with very little effort.
As with any, there is a ramp up time, but TinyMCE has never disappointed me.
We are using CKEditor_3.x in our MVC 2 app.
It works great.
On save:
Just 1 important note, in your CKEditor config file be sure to set:
config.htmlEncodeOutput = true;
Or you will get an error message.
Later on display
You will need to decode is like:
<%=HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(Html.TextAreaFor(model => model.Description).ToHtmlString())%>
Good luck!

Author in wiki, generate PDF documents, CHM files or embedded help

Anyone know of a wiki or wiki plugin that generates a PDF file or CHM file that spans the entire wiki?
I would like to have control of the table of contents.
I would like the internal and external links to work.
Ideally allow for tweaking the output template, but that is not a deal-breaker.
I want to generate content using WIKI syntax and mindset (lots of cross-links etc), but ship the content in PDF, CHM or an embedded application form. Something friendlier than installing the wiki software on the enduser machine...
XWiki does this out of the box.
The MediaWiki PDF Export extension allows you to select a group of PDF pages. I've not installed it yet, so unsure if it's easy to use that feature to select all the pages.
Confluence lets you choose pages when you export to PDF a space
But you can't customise a lot the PDF
You can customise it slightly through a theme (based on velocity)
Sphinx (https://www.sphinx-doc.org) is a fairly nice tool for generating HTML (or CHM) and PDF documentation, with wiki-like syntax. It is not a wiki; you can't edit through the web and generating HTML requires a build process. Still, it is pretty nice, with cross-references, fairly simple markup, and (in the HTML output) a search engine implemented in JavaScript with no server-side dependencies beyond static file hosting. Sphinx was developed for the new version of the Python documentation and is pretty themable; for example, the GeoServer project (which I work on, excuse the shameless plug) is using Sphinx with a custom theme for the new version of their user and developer manuals.
JIRA (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/default.jsp) is your geeky wet dream in terms of control; it exports to PDF (amongst other) and you can have complete control of pages, TOC and other aspects, although expect some complexity to set it up.
Microsoft has an HtmlHelp Authoring tool that can create chm files from html files.
If you need the help files both on the web and within deployed applications, generating the help from the same files used on the web could be a great solution. If the help site was created using asp.net (ie database driven) it might be worth using basic styles and creating a tool to generate html files by reading in the served out pages?
Have a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms524239(VS.85).aspx
I guess one could also additionally then create a PDF from the Html pages?

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