At Best Companies we regularly use PDF exports as a way of providing data to our clients.  Primarily being a web based business means that the majority of the information being exported is also being represented online somewhere so the simplest way of performing these exports has been to use a HTML to PDF converter, many of which are freely available.

While these tools may work for simple exports, when we came to require any sort of fine control over the PDF produced we started to run into problems using these tools.  Some of the specific problems we encountered were:
- Controlling where page breaks occur
- Finding out how many pages have been added for a piece of HTML
- Being able to edit pages once the PDF has been created
- Memory limits when generating large files

For example, when sending out paper surveys to employees we generate a large PDF containing all of the covering letters for an organisation.  These covering letters are handed to employees who are completing one of our surveys so their appearance is very important to us.  A covering letter for an employee could span many pages meaning that we wanted a high level of control over where the page breaks appeared (for example, we may not want them mid table) and we needed to be able to add unique elements for each employee after the file had been generated.  

In producing a PDF for a company, we were combining multiple covering letters into a single file.  To aid with automating the distribution process, we needed to know how many pages of the resulting file were required for each employee, as this could vary from one employee to another. The Aspose suite was a toolset we had come across for a standalone project a couple of years ago, but had not been widely adopted in the development team.  The project where it had been used was one where we wanted control over where all text appeared in a report so we knew that Aspose would offer us a level of control we couldn’t get from our existing component.

The trial version was easily imported into our project via Nuget and allowed us easily prototype a solution using Aspose.PDF.  While there are limitations on the trail version of the software, it was complete enough to validate that it would remove the limitations we had encountered with other tools and solve the technical problems we were encountering.  The online help and tutorials were a great help in getting us started working with the component and the interface was intuitive and easy to use.

We found that Aspose.PDF allowed us to generate PDFs by writing to the disk as the file is modified or perform modifications in memory, which helped us resolve memory issues we had encountered previously.  As the file is generated we were able to use the real time page count to track how many pages were required for each letter, helping us co-ordinate distribution of the file later.

The document level objects which can be added to a document (Section, Header, Text etc) gave us the control we needed to control page breaks and position additional items in the covering letter.

All in all, highly recommended. We’ll certainly be looking what else there is in the suite which we can leverage in future.