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 Document, Page, and Page Element are three common objects used.

• Document object - 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.

Generating a Document

The program flow for generating a basic PDF document is as follows.

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. Return 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.

Page Elements

Many useful page element classes are included with DynamicPDF Core Suite 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. REfer to the Custom Page Elements topic for more information.

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