Windows Developer Power Tools

4.12 Creating PDFs with iTextSharp

Adobe’s PDF format is one of the most widely accepted document formats in use today. Most users and clients expect that the software you write will be able to generate and work with PDFs. Unfortunately, however, Adobe does not offer a free SDK that you can download and use; you have to pay to license the API, and a fair amount of work is usually required to get it up and running.

iTextSharp alleviates this problem. iTextSharp is a port of the iText Java PDF library that gives you the ability to add PDF functionality to your applications. Using iTextSharp, you can create and read PDF files without any costs or proprietary software, so you can deliver the functionality your users expect.

iTextSharp at a Glance
Tool	iTextSharp
Version covered	3.1.0
Home page	http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/153
Summary	Full-featured PDF library for creating, reading, and working with Adobe’s PDF document format
License type	LGPL
Online resources	Mailing list
Supported Frameworks	.NET 1.1

Getting Started

Download the iTextSharp assembly from the tool’s home page and reference it in your project (see the Appendix).

Using iTextSharp

To start, you’ll need to add a couple of using statements to your code:

using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;

Then create a Document object:

Document pdfDocument = new Document( );

Next, create an ...