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Generating a PDF Document Using C#, .NET, and iText 7

By Chandra Kudumula Introduction This article is about generating PDF documents using C#, .NET, and the iText library. I had a requirement to generate an invoice as a PDF document for one of the projects I worked on. In my research, I came to know about iText. iText is a library for creating and manipulating […]

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Jan 21, 2020

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By Chandra Kudumula

Introduction

This article is about generating PDF documents using C#, .NET, and the iText library. I had a requirement to generate an invoice as a PDF document for one of the projects I worked on. In my research, I came to know about iText. iText is a library for creating and manipulating PDF files in .NET and Java. If you are struggling with C#, consider checking out the TechRepublic Academy.

Prerequisites

Visual Studio 2017 and above
.NET Framework, Version 4.0 and above
Installed iText 7 Library using NuGet Package Manager

Setting Up the Project

Step 1: Create the Console App Using Visual Studio

In Visual Studio, go to File -> New -> Project.

On the “New Project window”, select the Console App(.NET Framework) and give the project a name, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Selecting the Console App(.NET Framework)

Step 2: Install iText 7 Using “Manage NuGet Packages…”

Right-click the project name and select “Manage NuGet Packages…”. You can see this in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Selecting NuGet Packages

Select “Browse” and, in the search box, type itext7 and select itext7 from the searched results and install (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Selecting itext7

Following are the helpful classes and methods to generate the PDF document:

PdfWriter: To pass the file name and write content to the document.
PdfDocument: In-memory representation of the PDF document. It will open a PDF document in writing mode.
Document: Creates a document from in-memory PdfDocument.
Paragraph: Creates a paragraph, initialized with some text.
SetFontSize: Sets the font size of the text.
SetTextAlignment: Sets the text alignment, such as Left, Right, Center, and so forth.

I will add a Header, SubHeader, Line Separator, Image, Table, Hyperlink, and finally page numbers to the PDF document.

A. Adding a Header

Add a header to the PDF document. Header Content is center aligned to the document and I set the font size to 20. We can achieve this by creating a paragraph object. Following is the code snippet to create a paragraph object and add it to the document object. Finally, we need to close the document object by calling the Close() method.

using iText.Kernel.Pdf;
using iText.Layout;
using iText.Layout.Element;
using iText.Layout.Properties;

namespace GeneratePdfDemo
{
   class Program
   {
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         // Must have write permissions to the path folder
         PdfWriter writer = new PdfWriter("C:\\demo.pdf");
         PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument(writer);
         Document document = new Document(pdf);
         Paragraph header = new paragraph("HEADER")
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .SetFontSize(20);

         document.Add(header);
         document.Close();
      }
   }
}

Run the program and go to the path specified in PdfWriter and open the PDF document. Figure 4 is the image of a PDF document with header text.

Figure 4: Showing the header text

B. Creating a Sub Header

Create a Sub Header with text alignment center and set the font size to 15. Add this Sub Header to the document object, as shown in Figure 5.

Paragraph subheader = new Paragraph("SUB HEADER")
   .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
   .SetFontSize(15);
document.Add(subheader);

Figure 5: Creating the Sub Header

C. Adding a Horizontal Separator Line

Add a horizontal line using Line Separator. This is shown in Figure 6.

         // Line separator
         LineSeparator ls = new LineSeparator(new SolidLine());
         document.Add(ls);

Figure 6: Creating the separator line

D. Adding an Image

Add an Image to the PDF document by using an Image instance (see Figure 7).

         // Add image
         Image img = new Image(ImageDataFactory
            .Create(@"..\..\image.jpg"))
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER);
         document.Add(img);

Figure 7: Adding an image

E. Creating a Table

Create a Table and add it to the document, as shown in Figure 8.

         // Table
            Table table = new Table(2, false);
               Cell cell11 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("State"));
               Cell cell12 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("Capital"));

               Cell cell21 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("New York"));
               Cell cell22 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("Albany"));

               Cell cell31 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("New Jersey"));
               Cell cell32 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("Trenton"));

               Cell cell41 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("California"));
               Cell cell42 = new Cell(1, 1)
                  .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
                  .Add(new Paragraph("Sacramento"));

               table.AddCell(cell11);
               table.AddCell(cell12);
               table.AddCell(cell21);
               table.AddCell(cell22);
               table.AddCell(cell31);
               table.AddCell(cell32);
               table.AddCell(cell41);
               table.AddCell(cell42);
               document.Add(table);

Figure 8: Adding a table

F. Creating a Hyperlink

Create a Hyperlink and add it to the document (see Figure 9).

         // Hyper link
         Link link = new Link("click here",
            PdfAction.CreateURI("https://www.google.com"));
         Paragraph hyperLink = new Paragraph("Please ")
            .Add(link.SetBold().SetUnderline()
            .SetItalic().SetFontColor(ColorConstants.BLUE))
            .Add(" to go www.google.com.");

         document.Add(newline);
         document.Add(hyperLink);

Figure 9: Adding a hyperlink

G. Adding Page Numbers

Add Page numbers at the top right corner of the page, as shown in Figure 10.

         // Page numbers
         int n = pdf.GetNumberOfPages();
         for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++)
         {
            document.ShowTextAligned(new Paragraph(String
               .Format("page" + i + " of " + n)),
                559, 806, i, TextAlignment.RIGHT,
                VerticalAlignment.TOP, 0);
         }

Figure 10: Adding page numbers

Following is the complete code listing.

using iText.IO.Image;
using iText.Kernel.Colors;
using iText.Kernel.Pdf;
using iText.Kernel.Pdf.Action;
using iText.Kernel.Pdf.Canvas.Draw;
using iText.Layout;
using iText.Layout.Element;
using iText.Layout.Properties;
using System;

namespace GeneratePdfDemo
{
   class Program
   {
      static void Main(string[] args)
      {
         // Must have write permissions to the path folder
         PdfWriter writer = new PdfWriter("C:\\test\\demo.pdf");
         PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument(writer);
         Document document = new Document(pdf);

         // Header
         Paragraph header = new Paragraph("HEADER")
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .SetFontSize(20);

         // New line
         Paragraph newline = new Paragraph(new Text("\n"));

         document.Add(newline);
         document.Add(header);

         // Add sub-header
         Paragraph subheader = new Paragraph("SUB HEADER")
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .SetFontSize(15);
         document.Add(subheader);

         // Line separator
         LineSeparator ls = new LineSeparator(new SolidLine());
         document.Add(ls);

         // Add paragraph1
         Paragraph paragraph1 = new Paragraph("Lorem ipsum " +
            "dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, " +
            "sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore " +
            "et dolore magna aliqua.");
         document.Add(paragraph1);

         // Add image
         Image img = new Image(ImageDataFactory
            .Create(@"..\..\image.jpg"))
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER);
         document.Add(img);

         // Table
         Table table = new Table(2, false);
         Cell cell11 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("State"));
         Cell cell12 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetBackgroundColor(ColorConstants.GRAY)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("Capital"));

         Cell cell21 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("New York"));
         Cell cell22 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("Albany"));

         Cell cell31 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("New Jersey"));
         Cell cell32 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("Trenton"));

         Cell cell41 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("California"));
         Cell cell42 = new Cell(1, 1)
            .SetTextAlignment(TextAlignment.CENTER)
            .Add(new Paragraph("Sacramento"));

         table.AddCell(cell11);
         table.AddCell(cell12);
         table.AddCell(cell21);
         table.AddCell(cell22);
         table.AddCell(cell31);
         table.AddCell(cell32);
         table.AddCell(cell41);
         table.AddCell(cell42);

         document.Add(newline);
         document.Add(table);

         // Hyper link
         Link link = new Link("click here",
            PdfAction.CreateURI("https://www.google.com"));
         Paragraph hyperLink = new Paragraph("Please ")
            .Add(link.SetBold().SetUnderline()
            .SetItalic().SetFontColor(ColorConstants.BLUE))
            .Add(" to go www.google.com.");

         document.Add(newline);
         document.Add(hyperLink);

         // Page numbers
         int n = pdf.GetNumberOfPages();
         for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++)
         {
            document.ShowTextAligned(new Paragraph(String
               .Format("page" + i + " of " + n)),
               559, 806, i, TextAlignment.RIGHT,
               VerticalAlignment.TOP, 0);
         }

         // Close document
         document.Close();
      }
   }
}

Conclusion

You have seen how to generate the PDF document by using C#, .NET, and the iText library. iText allows lot of customization to PDF documents. I hope this article will help someone who wants to generate PDF documents.