These days financial, marketing and e-commerce websites allow us to download reports and receipts in pdf form. The Pdf file format is a convenient way of sharing information, as there is a high level of confidence that the user can open the document with the intended look and feel. This is even true for documents containing charts, images and text-based on dynamic data. There are many pdf writing tools available online, of which two commonly used ones are wkhtmltopdf and NReco. This blog article details the recent switch we made from wkhtmltopdf to NReco, and the numerous benefits of the switch.
Our experience with wkhtmltopdf
In the past, we generally used wkhtmltopdf to implement pdf functionality in our web applications. It was a practical choice, as it is an open-source tool with which we have extensive development experience already. The converter tool is given a destination file path and a URL of the report web page. Since the download button is contained within the generated report in web page form, the pdf conversion adds an unnecessary report generation step. To avoid this inefficiency, we wanted to explore different pdf converter options.
Our experience with NReco
We came across a library in a NuGet package called .Net Reusable Components (NReco), which contains a collection of reusable components for the .NET platform including a pdf conversion tool. The only input the tool requires is either a URL to the web page or the report contents as an HTML string. NReco is easier to implement, requiring only two to three lines of code. Even reports containing charts and images created using a third-party tool can be rendered to a pdf without additional coding. All CSS, fonts and images in HTML are supported by the NReco conversion tool.
The NReco tool is easy to install, and performs efficiently, taking much less time than wkhtmltopdf to generate a pdf. Although we currently only use NReco for pdf conversion, many other tools are available.
A major advantage of NReco, is that it supports both the .Net framework and .Net Core. Since we are looking to upgrade a number of our applications to .Net Core, it saves us considerable development time if we can use the existing code for pdf conversion.
To conclude, using NReco instead of wkhtmltopdf for pdf conversion has many benefits including easy implementation, performance, and compatibility with .Net Core.
About us
Our team of .Net developers have successfully delivered applications using ASP.Net Core, .Net & ASP.Net framework, Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, Team Foundation Server, Javascript and JQuery. For more info – https://www.metasyssoftware.com/dot-net