Convert HTML to PDF in .NET [closed]

EDIT: New Suggestion
HTML Renderer for PDF using PdfSharp

(After trying wkhtmltopdf and suggesting to avoid it)

HtmlRenderer.PdfSharp is a 100% fully C# managed code, easy to use, thread safe and most importantly FREE (New BSD License) solution.

Usage

1. Download HtmlRenderer.PdfSharp nuget package.

2. Use Example Method.

   public static Byte[] PdfSharpConvert(String html)
   {
       Byte[] res = null;
       using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
       {
           var pdf = TheArtOfDev.HtmlRenderer.PdfSharp.PdfGenerator.GeneratePdf(html, PdfSharp.PageSize.A4);
           pdf.Save(ms);
           res = ms.ToArray();
       }
       return res;
   }
   

A very Good Alternate Is a Free Version of iTextSharp

Until version 4.1.6 iTextSharp was licensed under the LGPL licence and versions until 4.16 (or there may be also forks) are available as packages and can be freely used. Of course someone can use the continued 5+ paid version.

I tried to integrate wkhtmltopdf solutions on my project and had a bunch of hurdles.

I personally would avoid using wkhtmltopdf – based solutions on Hosted Enterprise applications for the following reasons.

1. First of all wkhtmltopdf is C++ implemented not C#, and you will
   experience various problems embedding it within your C# code,
   especially while switching between 32bit and 64bit builds of your
   project. Had to try several workarounds including conditional
   project building etc. etc. just to avoid “invalid format exceptions”
   on different machines.
2. If you manage your own virtual machine its ok. But if your project
   is running within a constrained environment like (Azure
   (Actually is impossible withing azure as mentioned by the
   TuesPenchin author) ,
   Elastic Beanstalk etc) it’s a nightmare to configure that environment only for wkhtmltopdf to work.
3. wkhtmltopdf is creating files within your server so you have to
   manage user permissions and grant “write” access to where
   wkhtmltopdf is running.
4. Wkhtmltopdf is running as a standalone application, so its not
   managed by your IIS application pool. So you have to either host it
   as a service on another machine or you will experience processing spikes and memory consumption within your production
   server.
5. It uses temp files to generate the pdf, and in cases Like AWS
   EC2 which has really slow disk i/o it is a big performance
   problem.
6. The most hated “Unable to load DLL ‘wkhtmltox.dll'” error reported
   by many users.

— PRE Edit Section —

For anyone who want to generate pdf from html in simpler applications / environments I leave my old post as suggestion.

TuesPechkin

https://www.nuget.org/packages/TuesPechkin/

or Especially For MVC Web Applications
(But I think you may use it in any .net application)

Rotativa

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Rotativa/

They both utilize the
wkhtmtopdf binary for converting html to pdf. Which uses the webkit engine for rendering the pages so it can also parse css style sheets.

They provide easy to use seamless integration with C#.

Rotativa can also generate directly PDFs from any Razor View.

Additionally for real world web applications they also manage thread safety etc…