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Re: PDF library

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From: Steve Green
Date: Nov 25, 2022 6:51AM

There are very few libraries that generate tagged PDFs. JasperReports is Java based and produces tagged PDFs. There is a free open source version and a paid-for product owned by Tibco.

A third-party developer used it for one of our clients. They certainly made it look difficult, and the results were poor. I don't know if these are intrinsic problems or if the developers were not very good (they are one of the giant Indian IT companies, so this is very possible).

One of the problems they said was insoluble is that you cannot artifact anything, so all the page headers and footers appear in the middle of the content. This is bad enough, but when a table spanned two or more pages, the page header and footer appeared in the middle of the table, destroying its structure.

There is also Aspose for .NET. It claims to produce tagged PDFs but I have no experience of it.

If you find a good solution, I have a stack of clients who would like to know.

There are also a few services that connect via an API, which has the benefit that they are independent of your technology stack. Also, you don't have to do any development other than building your end of the API. You send the data to them and they send back a tagged PDF.

Commonlook have two such products. Commonlook Dynamic is best if your PDFs are heavily templated and it's only the data that changes. AI Cloud is more appropriate if the document structure is more variable. Both incur an on-going cost and are sufficiently expensive that none of our clients have implemented them.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd