Develop Reference

Exporting WPF Canvas to PDF

I've been attempting to find an easy solution to exporting a Canvas in my WPF Application to a PDF Document.
So far, the best solution has been to use the PrintDialog and set it up to automatically use the Microsoft Print the PDF 'printer'. The only problem I have had with this is that although the PrintDialog is skipped, there is a FileDialog to choose where the file should be saved.
Sadly, this is a deal-breaker because I would like to run this over a large number of canvases with automatically generated PDF names (well, programitically provided anyway).
Other solutions I have looked at include:
Using PrintDocument, but from my experimentation I would have to manually iterate through all my Canveses children and manually invoke the correct Draw method (of which a lot of my custom elements with transformation would be rather time consuming to do)
Exporting as a PNG image and then embedding that in a PDF. Although this works, TextBlocks within my canvas are no longer text. So this isn't an ideal situation.
Using the 3rd party library PDFSharp has the same downfall as the PrintDocument. A lot of custom logic for each element.
With PDFSharp. I did find a method fir generating the XGraphics from a Canvas but no way of then consuming that object to make a PDF Page
So does anybody know how I can skip or automate the PDF PrintDialog, or consume PDFSharp XGraphics to make
A page. Or any other ideas for directions to take this besides writing a whole library to convert each of my Canvas elements to PDF elements.

If you look at the output port of a recent windows installation of Microsoft Print To PDF
You may note it is set to PORTPROMP: and that is exactly what causes the request for a filename.
You might note lower down, I have several ports set to a filename, and the fourth one down is called "My Print to PDF"
So very last century methodology; when I print with a duplicate printer but give it a different name I can use different page ratios etc., without altering the built in standard one. The output for a file will naturally be built:-
A) Exactly in one repeatable location, that I can file monitor and rename it, based on the source calling the print sequence, such that if it is my current default printer I can right click files to print to a known \folder\file.pdf
B) The same port can be used via certain /pt (printto) command combinations to output, not just to that default port location, but to a given folder\name such as
"%ProgramFiles%\Windows NT\Accessories\WORDPAD.EXE" /pt listIN.doc "My Print to PDF" "My Print to PDF" "listOUT.pdf"
Other drivers usually charge for the convenience of WPF programmable renaming, but I will leave you that PrintVisual challenge for another of your three wishes.
MS suggest XPS is best But then they would be promoting it as a PDF competitor.
It does not need to be Doc[X]2PDF it could be [O]XPS2PDF or aPNG2PDF or many pages TIFF2PDF etc. etc. Any of those are Native to Win 10 also other 3rd party apps such as [Free]Office with a PrintTo verb will do XLS[X]2PDF. Imagination becomes pagination.

I had a great success in generating PDFs using PDFSharp in combination with SkiaSharp (for more advanced graphics).
Let me begin from the very end:
you save the PdfDocument object in the following way:
PdfDocument yourDocument = ...;
string filename = #"your\file\path\document.pdf"
yourDocument.Save(filename);
creating the PdfDocument with a page can be achieved the following way (adjust the parameters to fit your needs):
PdfDocument yourDocument = new PdfDocument();
yourDocument.PageLayout = PdfPageLayout.SinglePage;
yourDocument.Info.Title = "Your document title";
PdfPage yourPage = yourDocument.AddPage();
yourDocument.Orientation = PageOrientation.Landscape;
yourDocument.Size = PageSize.A4;
the PdfPage object's content (as an example I'm putting a string and an image) is filled in the following way:
using (XGraphics gfx = XGraphics.FromPdfPage(yourPage))
{
XFont yourFont = new XFont("Helvetica", 20, XFontStyle.Bold);
gfx.DrawString(
"Your string in the page",
yourFont,
XBrushes.Black,
new XRect(0, XUnit.FromMillimeter(10), page.Width, yourFont.GetHeight()),
XStringFormats.Center);
using (Stream s = new FileStream(#"path\to\your\image.png", FileMode.Open))
{
XImage image = XImage.FromStream(s);
var imageRect = new XRect()
{
Location = new XPoint() { X = XUnit.FromMillimeter(42), Y = XUnit.FromMillimeter(42) },
Size = new XSize() { Width = XUnit.FromMillimeter(42), Height = XUnit.FromMillimeter(42.0 * image.PixelHeight / image.PixelWidth) }
};
gfx.DrawImage(image, imageRect);
}
}
Of course, the font objects can be created as static members of your class.
And this is, in short to answer your question, how you consume the XGraphics object to create a PDF page.
Let me know if you need more assistance.

iTextSharp, add barcode to page 1 after generating document

I am using iTextSharp (5.5.5.90) to generate PDF files. I am using paragraphs and importing pages from readers and such. Here is how I create my document, from there I just append what I need:
FileStream fs = new FileStream("filename.pdf", FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None);
Document doc = new Document(new Rectangle(PageSize.LETTER), 58, 58, 100, 50);
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, fs);
Once the file is created, I add paragraphs like this:
doc.Add(new Paragraph("Paragraph text"));
And import pages from readers like this:
writer.DirectContent.AddTemplate(writer.GetImportedPage(reader, page), 0, 0);
My question is how would I go back to page one after generating the entire document and add an element to page one? I will be adding a barcode (I know how to add barcodes, tables and such where I want them on the current page), but I don't know how to "go back" to page one to add an element.
Here is the full code, but you won't be able to compile it because of dependencies. Also, don't get caught up in the details of the full code, as this is a large project to create dynamically generated documents. https://pastebin.com/kABi7fzW

I can't attest as to the exactly calls to iTextSharp's as we approached our documentation quite differently; open a Word template, at the data as DataTables, etc., do a MailMerge, close and reopen and save as PDF. Sounds more involved but doesn't require the granular level of detail you're doing of creating the document paragraph by paragraph but it does allow the document generator to worry about content and not style placement (handled via Word, manually and external to the application).
From experience with iTextSharp, you'll have a lot of trouble trying to float an element on top of a section to insert the barcode. The document generation tool has an annoying tendency to not quite work in this scenario. We endured many weeks of back and forth with iTextSharp support and a version upgrade and still couldn't get it to behave properly in all scenarios.
As discussed in the comments and given how you've already written your code (I doubt you'll scrap all that code and start with a MailMerge unless you really, really have to), you'll need to insert a placeholder block that you can locate via iTextSharp's PdfBuilder api. I'd imagine that setting a bookmark location would likely be the easiest way.
If it's possible (preferable?) to have the barcode on a page of its own, then you already have the code needed to do this (circa line 324 in your pastebin link) with;
// create doc...
// reopen doc and get page count
doc.NewPage();
// add barcode with page count + 1
// save

getting existing pdf as a byte array then rotate it as A4 Landscape in c#

I have a pdf which produced by SSRS. I need to get this pdf as a byte array then save whole pdf as a A4.Landscape.
I try ;
string say ="hello world";
byte [] pdfArr=Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(say)
var doc = new Document(iTextSharp.text.PageSize.A4_Landscape.Rotate());
string path = Environment.CurrentDirectory;
PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, new FileStream(path,"/pdfdoc.pdf",FileMode.Create));
doc.Open();
doc.Add(new Paragraph(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(pdfArr)));
doc.Close();
Process.Start(path+"/pdfdoc.pdf");
When I create new pdf by iTextsharp the above code works fine but when I try for the SSRS pdf, the pdf's inside fills with meaningless characters.
Also I know that, I can read and rotate page by page via PDFReader but I don't want to read the pages. Because, the reports table is too long so it divides into pages, I don't know how many pages should involved for one table, so my main aim is showing them in horizantal (landscape) as one table.
Any suggestions or code pieces are welcomed.
Thanks anyway..
Edit : As I explained in above paragraph, I can't take pages with pdfReader or something else because I don't want to change every page as landscape and I can't. It doesn't serve my aim. I just wat to create pdf as a landscape so all the loıng tables anda datas can seen in one page.

Extract pages from a PDF file using ITextSharp

Is it possible using IText to copy PDF pages from a full PDF document and return partial document based on a form field name? For example I need to copy the beginning of a pdf document and stop at a certain text field called [STOP_HERE], so whatever contents before this fields need to be extracted, the [STOP_HERE] field could be located on a different page for each document, so using page numbers wouldn't help here.
I searched online and all I can find is a way to copy only form fields from a document but not the whole document elements including images texts with their exact location and style.
Can IText do the job here?
EDIT: More details
[STOP_HERE] is an AcroForms text field which has been placed in a document by the PDF design person to indicate that everything before this element should be copied as is into a different document. The field itself is not important, I don't want to fill or do anything with it, it's just used as a signal to let the document parser stop there and copy all previous (upper) contents, I just don't know how to read all contents (without changing style, contents, etc) before this field.

Is it possible using IText to copy PDF pages from a full PDF document and return partial document based on a form field name? For example I need to copy the beginning of a pdf document and stop at a certain text field called [STOP_HERE]
Unfortunately the OP didn't tell whether the page containing the form field [STOP_HERE] is to be included or not. As that is a mere +/-1 matter, though, I simply assumed the page is to be included.
Thus, the task can be implemented like this:
PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(srcFile);
AcroFields.Item field = reader.AcroFields.Fields["[STOP_HERE]"];
if (field != null)
{
int firstPage = reader.NumberOfPages + 1;
for (int index = 0; index < field.Size; index++)
{
int page = field.GetPage(index);
if (page > 0 && page < firstPage)
firstPage = page;
}
if (firstPage <= reader.NumberOfPages)
{
reader.SelectPages("1-" + firstPage);
PdfStamper stamper = new PdfStamper(reader, new FileStream(dstFile, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write));
stamper.Close();
}
}
reader.Close();
The code opens the source file in a PdfReader and first looks for the field. If it exists, it iterates over all appearances of that field and determines the earliest page with an appearance of the field. If there is such a page, the code restricts the reader to the pages up to that page and stores this restriction using a PdfStamper.

iTextSharp: Split pages size equals file size

Here is how I split a large PDF (144 mb):
public int SplitAndSave(string inputPath, string outputPath)
{
FileInfo file = new FileInfo(inputPath);
string name = file.Name.Substring(0, file.Name.LastIndexOf("."));
using (PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(inputPath))
{
for (int pagenumber = 1; pagenumber <= reader.NumberOfPages; pagenumber++)
{
string filename = pagenumber.ToString() + ".pdf";
Document document = new Document();
PdfCopy copy = new PdfCopy(document, new FileStream(outputPath + "\\" + filename, FileMode.Create));
document.Open();
copy.AddPage(copy.GetImportedPage(reader, pagenumber));
document.Close();
}
return reader.NumberOfPages;
}
}
For most PDFs (small size, and I guess old format), all works fine. But for a bigger one (that perhaps are using something like refstreams for better compression), the split pages open as one page, but its size is equal to the original PDF's size. What can I do?

In case of your document Top_Gear_Magazine_2012_09.pdf the reason is indeed the one I mentioned: All pages refer to object 2 0 R as their /Resources, and the dictionary in 2 0 obj in turn references all images in the PDF.
To split that document into partial documents containing only the images required, you should preprocess the document by first finding out which images belong to which pages and then creating individual /Resources dictionaries for all pages.
As you already use iText in this context, you can also use it to find out which images are required for which pages. Use the iText parser package to initially parse the PDF page by page using a RenderListener implementation whose RenderImage method simply remembers which image objects are used on the current page. (As a special twist, iText hides the name of the image XObject in question; you get the indirect object, though, and can query its object and generation number which suffices for the next step.)
In a second step, you open the document in a PdfStamperand iterate over the pages. For each page you retrieve the /Resources dictionary and copy it, but only copy those XObjects references referencing one of the image objects whose object number and generation you remembered for the respective page during the first step. Finally you set the diminished copy as the /Resources dictionary of the page in question.
The resulting PDF should split just fine.
PS A very similar issue recently came up on the iText mailing list. In that thread the solution recipe given here has been improved, to get around the difficulties caused by iText hiding the xobject name, I now would propose to intervene before the name is lost by using a different ContentOperator for "Do", here the Java version:
class Do implements ContentOperator
{
public void invoke(PdfContentStreamProcessor processor, PdfLiteral operator, ArrayList<PdfObject> operands) throws IOException
{
PdfName xobjectName = (PdfName)operands.get(0);
names.add(xobjectName);
}
final List<PdfName> names = new ArrayList<PdfName>();
}
This content operator simply collects the names of the used xobjects, i.e. the xobject resources to keep for the given page.