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I'm writing a web-based app from scratch, that needs PDF generation capabilities. All other things being equal, does either .NET or PHP better lend themselves to that task?

Thanks-

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How big are the PDF files? What kind - text/image/mix? Generated as a report, converting files, etc etc? – Kieren Johnstone Mar 31 '11 at 14:59
Reason being - generating quick and easy stuff is OK for either, reporting frameworks take the choice out of your hands, and big conversion tasks .NET probably excels more at. – Kieren Johnstone Mar 31 '11 at 15:00

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I think it will depend more on what library you want to use to do the actual PDF generation, since everything else is the same.

  • iTextSharp is a great .Net generation library for PDF files and it is free.
  • The Zend PHP PDF framework is another free library that gets a lot of good reviews.

Since the PDF file is your focus, find the library that has the features you need and you feel most comfortable with, and work from there.

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iTextSharp is free for open source projects only (because it's released under AGPL). In other cases you should buy probably expensive license to use the library. – Bobrovsky Mar 31 '11 at 17:07
based on my experience it's not easy to use iTextSharp. The API looks pretty much like iText for java, not really .NET. most of the library is not documented as well. – Amr Ellafy Mar 14 '12 at 10:42
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I found fpdf to be a simple and roboust library for creating PDFs with PHP.

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PHP.net has some fairly good explanations on how to generate PDF's, I have not used it myself though. http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php

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