A: A deployment license can be used in a single application that can be deployed on a single server.

A redistributable license can be used in an unlimited number of applications that can be deployed on an unlimited number of servers and it can be used by an unlimited number of developers inside your company. A redistributable license can be distributed as part of your software with the condition to protect the license key in the compiled code of your application or to store the license key in an encrypted format out of the compiled code of your application. When you purchase a redistributable license key you also get free full maintenance for the first year including priority technical support and minor and major version updates for the software.

A full description of the license types can be found on the Buy Now web page of our website.

A: After a purchase order is successfully processed by one of our payment providers you'll receive by email a license key string for the product. In order to get the license key you have to make sure that the emails are not blocked by any spam filter you might have on your computer or in your network.

We don't do any physical delivery like DVDs or printed material.

A: Yes, we work with resellers. As reseller, when you place the order, you can use your information (credit card, company name, etc.) for billing and your customer information for delivery (name, email address, etc.). If use your company information both for billing and delivery then you have the obligation to transfer the license to your customer and to inform us about the identity of your client (company name, a contact person and email) such that your customer can get technical support from us directly. You also have the obligation to communicate to your customer the purchase order ID.

A: We don't have special prices for a non-profit organizations.

A: Yes, all our license types are perpetual. A purchased license will work with the version of the product for which it was purchased for an unlimited period of time and you can use it under the licensing terms and conditions without any additional fees.

A: First you need to purchase a redistributable license. Then you have to protect the license key string that you received after purchase either by including it in the compiled code of your application or by storing it in an encrypted format. You also have to clearly specify in the terms and conditions of your application that the usage of our component outside the functionality your application is illegal. Finally you have to make sure (by contacting our support or sales team directly) that your application does not compete with our products and the usage of our component is fully compliant with the terms and conditions from our license agreement

A: In general we don't accept refund requests for Winnovative Software products. The reasons for this decision are:

• All of our evaluation versions are fully functional
• You can evaluate our products for an unlimited period of time
• The products are well documented and we offer fully functional samples with full source code to get started with the product
• We offer free technical and sales support by email during the evaluation period and after the product purchase
• We encourage you to completely test our products both in development and production environments to see if they entirely meet your expectations before making the purchase decision

If you think there are any special circumstances for requesting a refund, please write us to support@winnovative-software.com and provide us with the details about the situation. We'll try to analyze your request as soon as possible.

A: The LicenseKey property of each PdfConverter and Document object must be set with the purchased license key. If you are confident that all these objects have this property properly set then make sure that you don't set a demo license key somewhere else in your code and the purchased license key is the only one used in your code. Our demo applications are using a demo license key and you might have copied code from our samples and left a demo license key in your code.

If nothing from suggestions above help then run your application in a debugger and check the value of the LicenseKey property of each PdfConverter and Document object right before the PDF document is produced and make sure that the purchased license key got set.

A: In general this error occurs when the web page referenced by the URL to convert is not accessible from the server where the converter is executed. The URL might not be accessible because it is invalid, because of network or DNS problems or because it requires authentication. In order to check that the URL you convert is accessible from the server start a new instance of a web browser on that server and try to open the web page from the URL you convert. Make sure the web page can be completely loaded without any warnings, errors, prompts or popups. If the web page requires HTTP authentication (like IIS Integrated Windows Authenication) you can set the credentials in PdfConverter.AuthenticationOptions property.

Another situation when this error can occur is when the web page takes too long to be loaded. In this case you can increase the PdfConverter.NavigationTimeout value. See the section below regarding the 'Navigation timeout' exception for more details.

A: When you convert a HTML string referencing external CSS files and images by relative URLs, the converter cannot determine the full URLs.

In order to solve this you have to set the baseURL parameter of the HTML string conversion method with the full URL of the page from where you have retrieved the HTML string.

As an alternative you can manually insert a BASE tag in the HEAD tag of the HTML page as in the example below or use full URLs in the HTML string:

              <HEAD> <BASE HREF="SiteURL"> </HEAD>

Note: This issue might also indicate an authentication or permissions problem on the server when accessing the external resources like images and CSS files. The HTML string is loaded into converter and the text is converted to PDF but the images and CSS files are still accessed from an URL and they might not be accessible. If the images and CSS require HTTP authentication (like IIS Integrated Windows Authentication) you have to set the AuthenticationOptions property of the converter.

If you are sure that the URL base you have set is correct but the images still don't appear in PDF you can try to prefix a relative image URL from the HTML string with the the base url to construct a full image URL. Then you can put this url in a web browser on the server where you perform the conversion and check that the image is correctly displayed in the browser. After that you can try to convert the image full URL to PDF using the GetPdfBytesFromUrl() method. If the image is not accessible you should get an error.

Another special situation where this problem might occur is for ASP.NET applications using forms authentication. The ASP.NET forms authentication implementation usually stores the forms authentication ticket in a cookie which should be sent back to server each time a resource is requested but the converter does not have the ability to automatically send this kind of cookie back to the server and therefore the authentication of the requests of external resources like images and CSS files can fail. A possible workaround for this problem is to manually send the forms authentication cookie ( .ASPXAUTH ) using the PdfConverter.HttpRequestCookies property:

            PdfConverter pdfConverter = new PdfConverter();

            // add the Forms Authentication cookie to request
            if (Request.Cookies[FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName] != null)
            {
                pdfConverter.HttpRequestCookies.Add(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName,
                     Request.Cookies[FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName].Value);
            }

            pdfConverter.GetPdfBytesFromUrl(urlToConvert);

Another workaround for forms authentication is to store the images and CSS files referenced by the web page to be converted in a location which doesn't require authentication (you can configure this in the web.config of your application). If this is not an acceptable solution then you can try to set the forms authentication to the cookieless mode. In this mode the encrypted authentication ticket is set in the URL query string and not in a cookie and the base URL parameter of the HTML string convert function should be set accordingly to the URL containing the authentication ticket. You can read more about forms authentication at the following address: Forms Authentication Explained .

A: The PdfConverter class (and the HtmlToPdfElement class) has a ConversionDelay property which can be used to specify an additional period of time in seconds to wait for asynchronous content to be loaded before starting PDF rendering.

A: The converter internally uses a HTML viewer to render the HTML page very similar to what the web browser does on the screen. The HTML viewer resolution is 96 DPI. The web page elements dimensions are usually measured in pixels and this is the reason why the HTML viewer width and height are also specified in pixels. These are the only dimensions used by the converter which are expressed in pixels. All the other dimensions are specified in points (1 point is 1/72 inches). The UnitsConverter class can be used to convert dimensions from pixels to points and from points to pixels.

You can specify the HTML viewer width and height in pixels using the PdfConverter.HtmlViewerWidth and PdfConverter.HtmlViewerHeight properties or you can specify the same values as parameters when you construct the PdfConverter object.

By default the HtmlViewerWidth is set to 1024 pixels which should be sufficient to display the majority of the web pages. If the web page you are converting cannot be completely displayed in this width then you can increase this value. The HtmlViewerHeight property is 0 by default which means the HTML viewer height will be automatically set to display the whole HTML page height.

After the HTML content is displayed in the HTML viewer the content will be transferred into PDF as you would take a picture of HTML viewer display and put that picture into a PDF document. The PDF documents pages have a fixed size in points. For example, the A4 portrait page is 595 points in width and 842 points in height. If the HTML viewer width is more than 595 points then the rendered HTML content will be shrunk to fit the PDF page width and display the whole HTML content in the PDF document. If the HTML viewer width is less than 595 points then the rendered HTML content will not be resized and will be rendered in the top left corner of the PDF page at real size.

The dimension of the A4 portrait page in pixels is 793x1122 pixels. This means that at a default HTML viewer width of 1024 pixels the HTML content will be scaled down to fit the PDF page. This is the reason why you see smaller fonts and images in PDF.
The calculation above does not take into account the possible margins set for the PDF page. If you have set the PDF page margins then the exact calculation of the available width in PDF page can be made using UnitsConverter API.

The FitWidth property was added to the PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions to control if the rendered HTML content can be scaled to fit the PDF page width. The default value is true which makes the HTML content to be resized if necessary to fit the PDF page width. When false, the HTML content will not be resized and it will be rendered at the real size in PDF.

When the FitWidth property is false the HTML content could be wider than the PDF page width and the therefore the HTML content will be cut off to the right in PDF. In this case, in order to get the whole content in PDF you have to set a wider page for the PDF document. You can first try to set landscape orientation for the PDF page by setting PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.PdfPageOrientation = PDFPageOrientation.Landscape. If this not enough you can choose a wider standard page like A3 or A2. It is also possible to set a custom size for the PDF page when the PdfConvert.PdfDocumentOptions.PdfPageSize=PdfPageSize.Custom In this case the custom size of the PDF page will be taken from PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.CustomPdfPageSize property. The PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.AutoSizePdfPage was added to automatically determine a custom PDF page width when the FitWidth property is false. The AutoSizePdfPage can create PDF documents with non-standard PDF page size.

If you don't want to resize the PDF page but you want to keep it A4 portrait for example, then you have to decrease the HTML viewer width. If your page can be correctly and entirely displayed in 793 pixels (which is the width of the A4 portrait page in pixels without margins at default 96 dpi resolution) you can set this value for PdfConverter.HTmlViewerWidth property and you should get the whole HTML rendered at real size in PDF.

The HTML content centering in PDF problem can be observed when the HTML content size is fixed and it is less than 1024 pixels in width. In this case there will normally be an empty space in the right side of the web page displayed at 1024 pixels. When the HTml viewer content is transfered to PDF the content will appear as not centered in PDF. You can also solve this if you set the PdfConverter.HtmlViewerWidth to a value of 793 pixels or less.

A: If the PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.FitWidth property value is true as it is by default (or HtmlToPdfElement.FitWidth when using a HTML to PDF element), then it means that the HTML document cannot be completely displayed in 1024 pixels which is the default value for the width of the internal browser display. To solve this issue you have to increase the PdfConverter.HTmlViewerWidth property (or HtmlToPdfElement.HtmlViewerWidth when using a HTML to PDF element) to a value in pixels enough to allow the full display of the HTML document.

If you set the PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.FitWidth property on false in your code (or HtmlToPdfElement.FitWidth property when using a HTML to PDF element) then most probably the rendered HTML content width is larger than PDF page width and since the converter was not set to fit the width of the PDF page the content will be truncated at the right side.

There are at least two possibilities to solve this problem function of if you want to use only standard PDF page sizes (like A4, A3, etc) or you can use custom PDF page sizes as well.

1. If want to use only standard PDF page sizes you can try first to set a landscape orientation for the PDF pages. You can do this by setting the PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.PdfPageOrientation = PDFPageOrientation.Landscape (or when using the HtmlToPdfElement specify a landscape orientation when you add the page that will hold the HtmlToPdfElement to the document). You can also choose a wider standard page like A3 instead of A4 and keep the portrait orientation.

2. If you can work with custom sized PDF pages than you can simply set the PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.AutoSizePdfPage=true and the converter will automatically select a custom PDF page width such that all the HTML document can be displayed or you can set PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.SinglePage = true to automatically determine both the width and height of the PDF page and produce a single PDF page containing all the rendered HTML document.

Please note that the AutoSizePdfPage and SinglePage properties are available only in PdfConverter and they are not available for a HTML to PDF element.

Another possibility, which works both for the PdfConverter and for the HtmlToPdfElement, is to specify a custom PDF page size wide enough to display the whole HTML content.
For the PdfConverter you have to set the PdfConvert.PdfDocumentOptions.PdfPageSize=PdfPageSize.Custom and the PdfConvert.PdfDocumentOptions.CustomPdfPageSize to the desired size in points of the PDF page.
For the HtmlToPdfElement you can specify the size of the PDF page when you add the page holding the HtmlToPdfElement to the PDF document.

In general, when creating PDF pages with custom size, you have to correlate the PDF page size with the HTML viewer width (which is 1024 pixels by default). For example, if you want to render the HTML document in 1200 pixels when the FitWidth is false, then the custom PDF page width in points can be determined using a call to UnitsConverter.PixelsToPoints(1200).

A: The margins come from the HTML document. To remove those margins, in the HTML document you convert set the BODY element margins to 0 pixels like in the example below:

<body style="margin: 0px">

A: The "Out of memory" exception can occur when converting a very large HTML document with many images and complex formatting or when many conversions run at the same time in the same process. The error can occur more often in a 32-bit process where the address space available for application is limited to about 2 GB and therefore it is highly recommended to run the converter in a 64-bit process in a 64-bit Windows.

Please be aware that in ASP.NET, even if your server is a 64-bit Windows, the IIS applications pool hosting your application can run in 32-bit mode if the 'Enable 32-Bit Applications' is True in application pool advanced settings. To make sure the converter runs in a 64-bit process you have to put this flag on False.

A: The "Navigation timeout" exception normally occurs when converting very large or slowly accessible web pages and when loading of the web page to convert takes more than 45 seconds. In this case you can simply set a bigger value for the PdfConverter.NavigationTimeout property.

When you load the web page to convert in a web browser on the server it might appear that the page is loaded properly but it can happen that an external resource like an image or a CSS file referenced by the web page is not accessible. In this case the IE web browser for example displays a "Waiting for..." message in the bottom status bar. The web browser can start rendering of the web page before all the resources are available but the converter will wait until all the resources are available before starting conversion. Therefore you first have to make sure that a web browser on the server displays a "Done" message in the bottom status bar when you load the web page to convert.

A: This error can occur when the wnvinternal.dat file does not have execute permission for the user running the converter. To correct this you can change the wnvinternal.dat file security permissions in Windows Explorer and grant execute permission to Everyone or only to the user running the converter.

A: Yes, the converter can be used in Windows Azure Cloud Services and in Azure Virtual Machines. It cannot be used in Azure Web Sites because this type of applications impose some restrictions which make the converter to fail.

If you already have an ASP.NET or MVC Visual Studio project for .NET 4.0 or later you can add a Cloud Service project and transform your ASP.NET application into a Web Role for this cloud service. Just right click on the ASP.NET project and select 'Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project' option from the contextual menu.

Now you can create a package you can deploy as a Windows Azure Cloud Service. Right click on the Cloud Service Project that has been added to your Visual Studio Solution and select 'Package' option from the contextual menu and click the 'Package' button from the opened dialog using 'Cloud' option for service configuration and 'Release' for build configuration. The location where the package and the package configuration file were created is automatically opened in Window Explorer.

To deploy the cloud service login into Windows Azure Management Portal and create a cloud service. Choose 'Custom Create' instead of the default 'Quick Create' and in the opened dialog enter an URL for the cloud service that will be used later to run your application and check on the 'Deploy a cloud service package' checkbox, validate and go to the next dialog. Enter a deployment name and select the package and package configuration files that have been previously created by Visual Studio. Select 'Production' as deployment environment and check on the 'Deploy even if one or more roles contain a single instance' and 'Start deployment' checkboxes and validate the dialog. The cloud service creation and deployment should be in progress now. It takes a few minutes until the cloud service instance is started. You can monitor the instance status in cloud service Instances tab and wait until the instance status becomes 'Running'. At that moment your cloud service is ready to run.

A: Yes, the converter works both in 32-bit and 64-bit environments. In general it is recommended to run the converter in 64-bit process because it offers more internal memory.

A: The converter can be used in applications targeting .NET Framework 2.0 or a later version (.NET 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.5).

There are two distinct sets of of libraries and samples in the same installation folder: for .NET CLR 2.0 (which is the runtime for .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5) and for .NET CLR 4.0 (which is the runtime for .NET 4.0 and .NET 4.5). The samples for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 are targeting .NET CLR 2.0 and the samples for Visual Studio 2010 are targeting .NET CLR 4.0.

Grace to In-Process Side by Side (inproc SxS) feature of the .NET 4.0 CLR, the library built for .NET 2.0 CLR can be used without change in applications targeting the .NET 4.0 framework, but in this case there will be an overhead because .NET 2.0 CLR and .NET 4.0 CLR will run side by side in the same process. So it is recommended to always use the library built for .NET CLR 4.0 in applications targeting the .NET 4.0 framework.

A: Yes, the converter supports SSL secured web pages.

A: If you are trying to convert a ASP.NET page you can use the Server.Execute method from to obtain the HTML string. Here is some C# code to obtain the HTML string from a page of your application:

        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
        Server.Execute("PageToConvert.aspx", sw);
        string htmlCodeToConvert = sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();

The converter library offers a set of methods for converting a HTML string to PDF. See the PdfInvoicesDemo sample for ASP.NET for a complete example of how to retrieve the HTML code and convert it to PDF. 

A: The converter executes the web page to be converted in a new session , different from the session in which your ASP.NET application runs. This basically happens because the converter does not send the session cookie from the browser back to the server. Therefore, the data currently stored in the session is not available in the converter web page even if the page is part of your application.

See the PdfInvoicesDemo sample for ASP.NET for a complete example of how to retrieve the HTML code from a ASP.NET page, pass the session data to the converted page and convert the HTML string to PDF. This sample is also installed in the live demo in our website.

Basically you have 2 options to consider when trying to overcome this situation : to send the necessary data for loading the page to be converted in the query string of the converted page URL or to get the web page HTML string using the Server.Execute(Url) method as we do in the PdfInvoicesDemo sample . The Server.Execute method is executed in your application session so all the session data and existing authentication should be valid.

When getting the HTML string with the Server.Execute(Url) method the resulted HTML code should reference the external CSS, images and JavaScript code by a full URL not by a relative URL. Here is some C# code to obtain the HTML string from a page of your application:

        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
        Server.Execute("PageToConvert.aspx", sw);
        string htmlCodeToConvert = sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();

To instruct the converter how to automatically turn all the relative URLs into absolute URL you have to pass the baseURL parameter of the conversion method with the full URL of the page from where you have taken the HTML string.

A: The session cookies stored by the browser are not automatically sent to the web server by the converter when the converter is called from an ASP.NET page.

It is possible to send cookies when a page is requested from the web server using the HttpRequestCookies property which is the recommended method. A cookie can also be sent to the web server using such a custom HTTP header defined in the HttpRequestHeaders property like below:

pdfConverter.HttpRequestHeaders.Add("Cookie", "cookieName1=cookieValue1; cookieName2=cookieValue2");

A: The converter offers support for HTTP authentication, for example any type of IIS authentication (Integrated Windows Authentication, Basic Authentication, etc). To enable server authentication you have to set the PdfConverter.AuthenticationOptions property with a username and password. The server authentication is usually necessary when accessing Intranet resources.

Please do not confound the server authentication with the ASP.NET forms authentication or a custom authentication method implemented at the level of your application (usually implemented as a login page in your application ). If you need to deal with application level authentication please read below.

The ASP.NET forms authentication implementation usually stores the forms authentication ticket in a cookie which should be sent back to server each time a resource is requested but the converter does not have the ability to automatically send this kind of cookie back to the server and therefore the authentication of the requests of external resources like images and CSS files can fail. A possible workaround for this problem is to manually send the forms authentication cookie ( .ASPXAUTH ) using the PdfConverter.HttpRequestCookies property:

            PdfConverter pdfConverter = new PdfConverter();

            // add the Forms Authentication cookie to request
            if (Request.Cookies[FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName] != null)
            {
                pdfConverter.HttpRequestCookies.Add(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName,
                     Request.Cookies[FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName].Value);
            }

            pdfConverter.GetPdfBytesFromUrl(urlToConvert);

Another workaround for forms authentication is to set the forms authentication to the cookieless mode. In this mode the encrypted authentication ticket is set in the URL query string and not in a cookie and the base URL parameter of the HTML string convert function should be set accordingly to the URL containing the authentication ticket. You can read more about forms authentication at the following address: Forms Authentication Explained .

An option to consider when trying to resolve the authentication issues (including authentication implemented at application level) is to get the HTML code of the web page using the Server.Execute(Url) method from ASP.NET and then convert that string to PDF as we do in the PdfInvoicesDemo sample for ASP.NET. The Server.Execute() method is executed in your application session so all the session data and existing authentication should be valid. However, the CSS files and images referenced by the HTML code to be converted should be placed in a location which doesn't require authentication.

See the PdfInvoicesDemo application for ASP.NET for a complete sample of how to retrieve the HTML code and convert the HTML string to PDF.

When getting the HTML string with the Server.Execute(Url) method the resulted HTML code should reference the external CSS, images and JavaScript code by a full URL not by a relative URL. Here is some C# code to obtain the HTML string from a page of your application:

        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
        Server.Execute("PageToConvert.aspx", sw);
        string htmlCodeToConvert = sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();

To instruct the converter how to automatically turn all the relative URLs into absolute URL you have to pass the baseURL parameter of the conversion method with the full URL of the page from where you have taken the HTML string.

If the images and CSS files referenced in the HTML string obtained as above require HTTP or forms authentication then you have to resolve these authentication types otherwise the images and CSS styles will not be applied in the generated PDF.

A: The HTML to PDF converter supports custom page breaks with standard CSS styles like page-break-before:always and page-break-after:always applied to any HTML object. These styles can be used either in a CSS class to be applied to an element or inline in the element style attribute. It is not recommended to use the page-break-after:always style on an empty element (like an empty DIV tag). Instead you can use the page-break-before:always on an empty element to produce the same effect.

The page-break-inside:avoid style can be applied to a element to prevent breaking the content of the element between PDF pages.

A: You can apply the page-break-inside:avoid CSS style to the HTML element you want to appear in the rendered PDF document on the same page. Of course the element height must be less than the page height, otherwise the style will be ignored by the converter.

<table>

        <tr style="page-break-inside : avoid">

            <td>

                <img width="100" height="100" src="img1.jpg">

            </td>

            <td>

                My text 1

            </td>

        </tr>

        <tr style="page-break-inside : avoid">

            <td>

                <img width="100" height="100" src="img2.jpg">

            </td>

            <td>

                My text 2

            </td>

        </tr>

</table>

In this example the table can contain a large number of rows, each row containing an image in the left and a text in the right and we don't want such a row to span on two pages. This can be easily achieved by specifying the page-break-inside:avoid style for the table row.

A: Set the PdfConverter.AvoidImageBreak property on true. By default this property is false and the images might get cut off between PDF pages. You can also set the page-break-inside:avoid CSS style inline on the IMG tag to achieve the same result.

A: The HTML table header and footer are automatically repeated on each PDF page when the thead tag of the HTML table has the display:table-header-group style and the tfoot tag of the HTML table has the display:table-footer-group style. These are the default styles in HTML and the header and footer are automatically repeated in PDF. To disable the header and footer repeating you have to explicitly set the display:table-row-group style for thead and tfoot tags. We provide the Repeat Table Head sample in the demo application of the converter to demonstrate this feature.

A: You can add HTML in the header and footer of the rendered PDF document. To add HTML in the header you have to initialize the PdfConverter.PdfHeaderOptions.HtmlToPdfArea property with a HtmlToPdfArea object which can be constructed from a HTML string or an URL. Please check our documentation and samples for more details.

A: By default the header (or footer) is the same for all the pages in the generated PDF document. The header and footer content is defined by the PdfHeaderOptions and PdfFooterOptions properties of the PdfConverter class.

Using the Winnovative HTML to PDF Converter library it is possible to override the default header or footer for any of the pages of the generated PDF document. The HTML in Header and Footer sample from the demo application contains sample code for how to alternate the header and footer content on odd and even pages of the generated PDF document. The only limitation is that the header or footer height must be the same on all the PDF pages.

A: Please check the 'Convert Multiple URLs into Same PDF' sample from the demo application.

A: The PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.LiveUrlsEnabled controls the rendering of http links in the resulted PDF document. By default this property is true.

A: The converter supports any true type font preinstalled in Windows operating system. It also supports the open type fonts with the condition that the open type font has TrueType outlines not PostScript outlines. To check what type of outlines has an installed font, you can open the font from the Fonts folder in Control Panel. When a font is not supported by the converter the MS Sans Serif font is used by default.

The converter also supports custom true type fonts you can install from a .ttf or a .otf file. After you have installed a font it becomes available only for the currently logged in Windows user who installed the font. In order to make the font available for all the users, including the ASP.NET user in the case you are using the converter from an ASP.NET application, you have to reboot the computer after font installation.

To embed the true type fonts in the generated PDF you have to set PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.EmbedFonts=true. By default this property is false. The same property is also available in the HtmlToPdfElement.

First make sure that you restarted the server after true type font installation. After you have installed a font it becomes available only for the currently logged in Windows user who installed the font. In order to make the font available for all the users, including the ASP.NET user, in case you are using the converter from an ASP.NET application, you have to restart the server after font installation.

If the server restarting didn't solve the problem then make sure you installed a supported type of font. The converter supports any true type font preinstalled in Windows operating system. It also supports the open type fonts with the condition that the open type font has TrueType outlines not PostScript outlines. To check what type of outlines has an installed font, you can open the font from the Fonts folder in Control Panel. When a font is not supported by the converter the MS Sans Serif font is used by default.

Another situation when the default font is used occurs when the style used for a font is not supported by that font. The true type fonts have separate glyphs for different styles. For example a font can have separate glyphs for the normal, italic or bold styles. Some fonts can support only the normal style other fonts can support only the italic style. You have to use only the styles supported for a true type font. You can see what styles are available for a font in the Fonts folder of the Control Panel. If a font does not have the required style the converter first tries to use a supported style and if it is not possible then a default font is used.

Each true type font has a table of supported unicode characters. If you are trying to use a font for a Unicode text for which the font does not have associated glyphs the displayed text in PDF will be incorrect. You always have to make sure that the font used for a Unicode text supports the language of that text.

If you have a Windows XP or a Windows Server 2003 computer it is also recommended to enable the support for supplemental languages by checking on the checkboxes 'Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages' and 'Install files for East Asian languages' in the 'Languages' tab accessible from Windows Control Panel under 'Regional and Language Options' section.
For Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and later Windows versions the support for these languages is enabled by default and no special setup is necessary.

Yes, the converter supports all these types of languages. If you have a Windows XP or a Windows Server 2003 computer you have to explicitly enable the support for supplemental languages by checking on the checkboxes 'Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages' and 'Install files for East Asian languages' in the 'Languages' tab accessible from Windows Control Panel under 'Regional and Language Options' section.
For Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and later Windows versions the support for these languages is enabled by default and no special setup is necessary.

A: By default the the converter is using JPEG to compress images in PDF and to reduce the size of the generated PDF document. The compression level of the images is controlled by the PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.JpegCompressionLevel property. When the JpegCompressionLevel is 0, the compression rate is the lowest and the quality of the images is the best. When the JpegCompressionLevel is 100, the compression rate is the highest and quality of the images in PDF is the worst. The default JPEG compression level is 10, which should offer a good balance between the compression rate and the quality of the images in PDF.

It is also possible to completely disable the JPEG compression and store the images as bitmaps in PDF if you set PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.JpegCompressionEnabled to false. This produces the best quality of the images but the generated PDF document can be very large and the conversion process is slower.

A: Instead of the code from our samples which sends the PDF bytes to the browser as an attachment you can use the following code to open the generated PDF document inline:

        System.Web.HttpResponse response = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response;

        response.Clear();

        response.AddHeader("Content-Type", "application/pdf");

        response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition",

            "inline; filename=" + downloadName + "; size=" + downloadBytes.Length.ToString());

        response.Flush();

        response.BinaryWrite(downloadBytes);

        response.Flush();

        response.End();

A: You can use the Document.OpenAction.Action property to set a PdfActionJavaScript object representing the JavaScript code you want to execute when the PDF document is opened in the viewer. For example you can use the code below to display an alert message when the document is opened:

document.OpenAction.Action = new PdfActionJavaScript("app.alert('Hello');");

The document object is either the Document instance created by your application or a Document object produced by the HTML to PDF library when using a method like PdfConverter.GetPdfDocumentObjectFromUrl().

A: You can use the Document.OpenAction.Action property to set a PdfActionGoTo object representing the destination displayed when the PDF document is opened in the viewer. For example you can use the code below to automatically go to the second page in document when the document is opened in the PDF Viewer:

document.OpenAction.Action = new PdfActionGoTo(new ExplicitDestination(document.Pages[1], new PointF(0,0)));

The document object is either the Document instance created by your application or a Document object produced by the HTML to PDF library when using a method like PdfConverter.GetPdfDocumentObjectFromUrl().

A: You can add external PDF files and streams to the conversion result using the AppendPDFFile, AppendPDFFileArray, AppendPDFStream and AppendPDFStreamArray properties of the PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions or using the Document.AppendDocument() method. We have examples for both techniques in the demo application.

A: You can set the PdfConvert.PdfDocumentOptions.PdfPageSize=PdfPageSize.Custom and in this case the custom size of the PDF page will be taken from PdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.CustomPdfPageSize property where you can specify the width and height of the PDF page in points.

A: The HTML to PDF converter library is a .NET 2.0 or 4.0 library and it is not working with .NET 1.1 directly. The workaround for this is to create a .NET web service and call that service from your application.

A: Use the following property:

pdfConverter.PdfDocumentOptions.PdfPageOrientation = PDFPageOrientation.Landscape;

A: This indicates the converter was not able to correctly determine the height of the web page. The work around is to explicitly set the web page in pixels or to convert directly the web pages referred by the frameset frames. For example you can set pdfConverter.HtmlViewerHeight = 2000;

A: The converter requires Full Trust level for the ASP.NET application calling it. The default trust level for an ASP.NET applications is Full Trust but the shared hosting providers usually modify the trust level to Medium Trust which makes our converter to not run properly in such environments. In order to solve this issue you can ask you shared hosting provider to give Full Trust level for you ASP.NET application. Another possibility is to create a ASP.NET web service around the converter library, install that web service on a machine where the full trust is allowed and call the web service from your application. You have to ensure that the web service you create can be used only from your application.

If you don't want to manage your own server then you can try to use the Windows Azure Cloud service. The converter should work well in this environment.

A: The converter needs a full trust level for your ASP.NET application in order to correctly execute. The default trust level is full but some of the hosting providers set this to medium or lower. The trust level can be set in the Web.config of the application ( <trust level="Full"/> under the <system.web> config section ) but the hosting provider could also forbid overriding the trust level from the web site configuration file.  

If your application already has full trust that means more security restrictions are imposed by the Windows to the assembly.

A special situation when this exception can occur is when the operating system marks the assembly as "Blocked" because it was downloaded from Internet. You can check the assembly was blocked if you right click on the file in Windows Explorer and select Properties. At the bottom of the Properties tab there should be an "Unblock" bottom if the assembly was blocked and the message "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer" should be displayed near that button. To unblock the assembly and allow its execution simply click the "Unblock" button and restart the IIS application pool of your application to make sure the change was applied.

Another solution in this situation is to change the identity of the IIS pool of your application to a less restrictive account. The Network Service account should normally allow the execution of the assembly.

A: This problem was occuring in old versions of the converter because of the IE9 or later rendering engine. Starting with version 9.0 of the converter IE is not used anymore as rendering engine and therefore the problem should not occur anymore.