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March 2024: We now have a dedicated article about how to Render and print PDF documents in C# and VB.NET. The article contains the most recent information about the topic. Please read the article instead of this blog post. We keep the blog post for historical reasons only.

.NET Framework provides good support for printing in Windows Forms, WPF and Windows Store applications. You can easily show print preview dialog, customize print settings and, actually, print documents. You just need to prepare your document for printing – convert the document to a sequence of drawing commands or convert the document to the one of printer-friendly formats like XPS. It might be painful if format of your document is a complex one.

PDF is an example of such a complex document format. It is one of the most popular file formats for publishing documents, but .NET does not support printing of PDF documents out of the box.

Docotic.Pdf library adds support for printing PDF documents in .NET applications. I will show how to build a Windows Forms application that prints PDF documents. The application will display print preview dialog before printing, will have support for custom print settings and, of course, will print PDF documents to the selected printer.

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New version of Docotic.Pdf library is out.

Docotic.Pdf 4.2 is mostly a “bug fixes and improvements” release. Nevertheless, it brings some new features, too.

The new version adds ability to embed previously non-embedded fonts and vice versa. Have a look at PdfFont.Embed() and PdfFont.Unembed() methods.

For those who are willing to produce smallest PDFs possible there is new ability to remove structure information from documents. We added PdfDocument.RemoveStructureInformation() method and PdfSaveOptions.RemoveUnusedObjects property for you.

Form filling become more capable in this version. Library can rotate controls. You can specify font size equal to zero for text and combo boxes (to cause their font size to be auto adjusted). In addition, the new version can import appearance streams while importing FDF files.

The new version does better job in recompressing and scaling of images. Version 4.2 also draws documents better. Especially in high resolutions.

There are other improvements and a whole lot of bug fixes. Too much to talk about them here. Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 4.2 in the Version History document. There are information about one breaking change related to fonts.

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

We have released new version of Docotic.Pdf library.

Docotic.Pdf 4.1 fixes some bugs related to opening of existing documents (including encrypted ones). The new version also brings number of improvements in drawing of PDF documents as well as in extraction of images.

This version adds new PdfDrawOptions.TileWidth and PdfDrawOptions.TileHeight properties which can be used to control how much memory is used while drawing.

Drawing of PDF documents using tiles can be slower than regular drawing but it allows you to draw very big documents in high resolution without consuming obscene amounts of memory. Were are expecting some speed optimizations in tiled drawing in upcoming releases of the library.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 4.1 in the Version History document.

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

I am very happy to announce that we’ve released Docotic.Pdf 4 on our site.

Seven months of active development were not in vain: the new major release brings some great improvements.

Docotic.Pdf 4 comes with new, much improved text rendering engine. With the new engine text gets drawn at the right positions with the right font. The new version of the library produces much more accurate outputs then the previous version did. Let me assure you: you will see the difference.

Text rendering and text extraction are often go hand in hand. With Docotic.Pdf that’s not different. New version of the library extracts text more precisely and can provide you more information about text in a PDF document. You can know the font, the pen and brush color and the rendering mode used to draw any chunk of text. There are new properties in the PdfTextData class for that.

The new version adds support for JPEG 2000 images. The library can add, extract and draw them. Other imaging related areas also received some of our attention. Some bugs related to processing of JPEGs were fixed. Extraction of images (including masked ones and those in the CMYK color space) was improved.

As with every release of the library, we also fixed processing of some PDFs which not quite meet the standard and documents with unusual internal structure.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 4 in the Version History document.

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

I am happy to announce that Docotic.Pdf 3.7 is finally released.

Like in the previous release of the library, we optimized the code of Docotic.Pdf and now library opens documents even faster than before. The new release also adds some new features, part of which were suggested by our customers. And there are some bug fixes in the new version, too.

We added ability to embed and extract file attachments and file annotations. Please have a look at the new group of samples called Attachments.

The library improved to better preserve existing structures in PDF files. It means that Docotic.Pdf will try to keep an internal structure of a file as is unless it was changed by the user.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 3.7 in Version History document

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hi!

We have released new version of the Docotic.Pdf library. Most of the changes in this version are likely to benefit every customer.

We greatly optimized the code of the library and now Docotic.Pdf takes two times less time and in many cases two times less memory to complete a task. We published separate post about results of our optimizations. You can read it here.

We added ability to check if PDF document is a PDF/A compliant one. Please have a look at Check if PDF document is a PDF/A compliant one sample.

We also added new compression option. It’s called PdfSaveOptions.OptimizeIndirectObjects property. This option is turned on by default and you can turn it off if you want files to be saved faster.

Another improvement is ability to specify resolution for images produced while drawing pages.

We also improved processing of TIFF images and extraction of text and images from PDF documents.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 3.6 in Version History document

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

Our customers told us that Docotic.Pdf is not always behaves modestly. The library tends to consume large amounts of memory for large files and often spends much time doing some operations.

We’ve done a lot to make new version of Docotic.Pdf faster and less memory-consuming. Now I want to share some statistics about results of our efforts.

To see what we achieved, we took five PDF files and ran some tests on them. Here is the description of the files we took:

File name	Page count	File size	Contents
emerging.pdf	6	94 KB	only text
rdsolr1907.pdf	111	2.03 MB	mostly text, some images, linearized
official_journal_10022006.pdf	705	20 MB	mostly text, some images, linearized
LargePDFFile.pdf	4800	34 MB	mostly text, some images, linearized
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	765	146 MB	mostly scanned images

For a start, we measured how much time and how many memory required to just open a file. The table below contains relative results of our measurements:

Open only
File name	Time, %	Memory consumption, %
emerging.pdf	-13	-51
rdsolr1907.pdf	-44	-55
official_journal_10022006.pdf	-87	-95
LargePDFFile.pdf	-91	-83
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	-31	-53

It’s nice to see that opening of PDF files is now about 2 times faster and takes about 3 times less memory (on average). And for larger files improvements are even more obvious.

But how the library behaves in more complex scenarios?

Next, we took the same files and measured time and memory required to open PDF and extract formatted text from all of its pages. Below are the results:

Open and extract all text with formatting
File name	Time, %	Memory consumption, %
emerging.pdf	-10	-33
rdsolr1907.pdf	-70	-26
official_journal_10022006.pdf	-59	-39
LargePDFFile.pdf	-66	-39
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	-54	-31

And again the whole process took about two times less time (on average). Memory gains are less impressive this time but still, about 30% less memory (on average) is not bad at all.

The last one test is simple but represents a real-life scenario. We measured time and memory required to open PDF, then encrypt it with AES 128bit and then save. Below are the results:

Open, encrypt with AES 128bit and save
File name	Time, %	Memory consumption, %
emerging.pdf	-17	-69
rdsolr1907.pdf	-42	-9
official_journal_10022006.pdf	-84	-70
LargePDFFile.pdf	-69	-41
OReilly.Head.First.C.Sharp.Nov.2007.pdf	-19	-69

In this case the whole process took about 2 times less time and memory (on average).

We think that such improvements won’t go unnoticed by our customers. And we want to say that we have some thoughts about how to further improve the library. So, we continue to profile and improve Docotic.Pdf.

Please feel free to share your thoughts about recent improvements.

Hello!

We have released new version of the Docotic.Pdf library. The new version brings improvements in text and image extraction as well as in other areas.

We added ability to check if an image painted transformed and ability to save such image as painted, i.e. taking into account rotation, scaling and other transformations that might be applied to the image. Another new feature is ability to save PDF pages as TIFF images.

The new version of Docotic.Pdf library adds support for PDF form XObjects. Such objects are often used for watermarks, backgrounds and repeatable objects. XObjects can be created from scratch or from existing pages (from current or other document). Using XObjects created from pages you can impose (combine) PDF pages onto larger (or same size) sheets to make books, booklets, or special arrangements. Please have a look at new samples that show how to create and use PDF form XObjects.

As with every release of the library, we also fixed some bugs. This version fixes bugs related to opening of existing PDF documents with forms, reading document permissions and processing of fonts and images.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 3.5 in Version History document

We encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions, suggest features or ask for help.

Hello!

Our clients often ask us how to read some data from a database and then write that data to a PDF document. Common use case is to get people names and a PDF template and create personalized documents for clients.

Let’s look how to do this with help of Docotic.Pdf. The demo application from this article will read names from database and then modify template PDF by putting the names on to the first page.

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Hello!

We released new version of Docotic.Pdf library.

The version 3.4 adds new major feature: PDF rasterizer. Now the library can be used to draw and print PDF documents. And of course you can save images of document pages in PNG and JPEG format. Take a look at PdfPage.Save and PdfPage.Draw methods. You might find new group of samples interesting too.

This version also features improved support for extraction of text and images. You can now extract text as collection of words (with their bounding rectangles) and even individual characters. We added new Extract text by words sample that demonstrates how to do this.

From now on the library might be used to extract page objects. I.e. you can get collection of text and image objects to perform sophisticated analysis of what’s drawn on a page. Take a look at Extract text and images sample to get an idea of what information could be retrieved.

The new version adds support for extraction of previously unsupported image types. You might also be interested in new ability to scale and resize existing images in PDF documents. This ability is useful for optimization of existing documents.

As with any release of Docotic.Pdf, we also fixed some bugs. This version fixes bugs related to opening of existing PDF documents and processing of fonts and images. We also made library to use less time and memory for opening of existing PDFs.

Read about all new features and improvements in Docotic.Pdf 3.4 in Version History document.

As always, we encourage you to download and try the new version.

Please write us about your findings with Docotic.Pdf using e-mail or via the support form. Don’t hesitate to write us your questions or ask for help.