PDF Creation Overview

Creating PDFs using DynamicPDF Core Suite for .NET (previously the DynamicPDF Generator for .NET functionality) is straight forward and the object model can be learned very quickly. There are three common objects that are used: Document, Page, and Page Element objects. The Document object represents a PDF document. The Page object represents a page in the PDF document. The Page Element objects represent elements, such as text or graphics, that can be placed on a page. The program flow for generating a basic PDF document is outlined below:

  1. Create a Document object.
  2. Create a Page object.
  3. Create and add Page Element objects to the page.
  4. Add the Page object to the document.
  5. Go back to step 2 and repeat until all pages are created.
  6. Output the PDF document to a file, Stream object or to IIS's output stream.

Many useful page element classes are included with the product and can be found in the ceTe.DynamicPDF.PageElements and ceTe.DynamicPDF.PageElements.BarCoding namespaces. Custom Page Elements can be created by inheriting from the PageElement base class. This is discussed in the Custom Page Elements topic.

Page Elements can be reused on different pages using templates. For more information on templates see the Templates topic. There is also a Group object that can be used to logically group Page Elements together for reuse on multiple pages.

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