What's New in Documents for PDF v6

GrapeCity Documents for PDF (GcPdf)

Rendering HTML to PDF and Raster Images

GcPdf v6 release has updated the existing GrapeCity.Documents.Html (GcHtml) package with new API for converting HTML markup to PDF. The new package does not depend on a custom build of Chromium and does not include any GPL or LGPL licensed code. Also, GcHtml no longer requires any platform dependent packages specific to Windows, macOS and Linux, as required by the previous version of GcHtml. The package introduces GcHtmlBrowser class - the main licensed class which represents a browser process, such as Chrome, Edge, or Chromium browser, and BrowserFetcher class that helps with discovering the path to the browser or downloading the Chromium browser from the public server. An instance of GcHtmlBrowser has two important methods: NewPage(Uri uri) and NewPage(string html). Both methods return an instance of HtmlPage class which represents a browser tab after navigating to the specified web address, file, or the arbitrary HTML content.

• No dependencies on custom Chromium build.

• No dependency on GPL/LGPL licensed software

• Use the same browser instance to render multiple pages

• Modify/replace the HTML page content

There is a lot more to the introduction of the new GcHtml package. Have a look on following resources to read more on how to use this package.

• Steps to migrate old project to use new packages
• Steps from scratch to convert HTML to PDF/Images
• GrapeCity Documents for HTML Product Architecture
• View full blog: Import HTML to PDF documents
• Demo

Support for Appearance streams for all annotations

To render annotations with the same display in all viewers, Appearance streams are associated with annotations - these are optional settings part of the PDF specification. GcPdf now supports an appearance stream for all annotations it supports, thereby rendering the annotations exactly with the same appearance in any viewer. Please note - In this version, GcPdf cannot generate correct appearance streams for rich text.

Additionally, in the v6 release, GcPdf adds GcPdfDocument.BuildRichTextAppearanceStreams boolean property, which generates content streams for annotations having rich text. This property is false by default, so the content streams with rich text are not generated, and viewers supporting rich text can render these annotations the same as before. If set to true, GcPdf will generate the content streams using plain text so that the rich text will be lost, but the annotation will look the same in all viewers. In the snapshot below, this property is set to false, so the free text annotation with rich text is shown correctly. The appearance of annotations is the same as rendered in Acrobat.

// Save the pages of the current PDF document as PNG images and specify destination zip file name
viewer.saveAsImages('images.zip');