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majora2007 | 3 months ago

There are a few non-paid PDF libraries, but that is the biggest pain point in .NET, anytime you need advanced features for PDF, you're better off paying for a license (it's just insanely expensive unless you're a large company).

Having worked on some basic parsing of metadata from PDF spec, I would rather pay than have to code something myself. PDF is such a PIA.

discuss

jasomill|3 months ago

I've used libqpdf extensively from C++/CLI with excellent results, but since C++/CLI is deprecated-ish and Windows-only, I wouldn't disagree with PDF being a pain point, and if I get the time, a cross-platform open source .NET wrapper for libqpdf is at the top of my list of potential projects.

libqpdf also intentionally limits its scope to PDF structure, so doesn't address nontrivial content creation or manipulation (page content handling is pretty much limited to compressing/decompressing and parsing/unparsing the content stream).

tracker1|3 months ago

AFAIK pinvoke (DllImport) works today just like it always has if you want to create FFI calls to C libraries. It's not windows only for sure.