PDFsharp & MigraDoc Foundation

Hi all!

Some important facts about MigraDoc, PDFsharp, and PDF.

Let's start with MigraDoc.

• With MigraDoc, you create documents dynamically. At this stage, you have a document with sections, paragraphs, tables - but no pages. When the document is rendered to PDF, MigraDoc will create pages for you; when rendered to RTF, no pages are created until you use Word or another application to print the document; when rendering to HTML, you would get one file per section (rendering to HTML is currently not implemented).
• Questions like "I don't know how much space I have left on my page" make no sense with Migradoc because pages do not (yet) exist when you create the document.
• MigraDoc documents are highly dynamic, you can change anything at any time. You can add sections and tables. And finally you change the font size for style "Normal" from 10 to 14. MigraDoc adds the pagebreaks automatically when the document is rendered to PDF - and the table header will be repeated on every new page.
• MigraDoc can be used in a different way: you can measure anything you add to the document, you can add page breaks when needed, you can start a new table with every new page to get a different table header for each page. This can be done, but MigraDoc was not designed to be used this way.

About PDFsharp:

• PDFsharp cannot render PDF - not on the screen, not on a printer.
• PDFsharp cannot convert HTML or RTF to PDF (there is a third-party library on NuGet for HTML: "HTML Renderer for PDF using PdfSharp").
• PDFsharp cannot convert PDF to HTML or RTF.

Finally information about PDF.

• PDF is a vector format. There are no pixels in a PDF file, there is no DPI. You can add raster images to a PDF file - and those images will have pixels and there will be horizontal and vertical DPI values, but text and lines etc. do not have pixels.
• Dimensions are often specified in points. There are 72 points per inch. Point is just a unit, there are no pixels still. You can draw lines that are e.g. 0.5 or 0.25 points wide or even smaller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)

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Regards
Thomas Hoevel
PDFsharp Team

Hello Thomas,

You mentioned facts about MigraDoc and PDF, I guess you missed PDFSharp!

Thanks

Hi!
No. Initially I planned to have two categories (MigraDoc and PDFsharp). When I added PDF as a third category, I had nothing left for PDFsharp, but I left it in the subject for future expansion.

_________________
Regards
Thomas Hoevel
PDFsharp Team

Hi Thomas,

you mention the capability of MigraDoc to render to HTML, too; I cannot find information how to do this. Is there any documentation or examples how this is possible?

Thanks,
Fabian

Hi, Fabian!
The current implementation does not support rendering to HTML.
The old version that supports HTML requires .NET 1.1 and is of little use on modern computers (I think .NET 1.1 cannot be used with Windows 8.1 or Windows 10).

There wasn't much demand for an HTML renderer in the past few years and I don't think there'll be a new HTML renderer in the next few years.

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Regards
Thomas Hoevel
PDFsharp Team