I would have thought that producing a PDF was not that hard. We take some industry standard markup*, thrown it into a library, and get a PDF out the far side. Right? Wrong!

*By industry standard markup, I of course mean HTML. What else ?

To start with there is not a lot of compatibility between HTML and PDF markup, and secondly thats just not how it works. Most libraries concentrate on building a document by positioning each item of text or graphic or line or curve individually. Which is fiddly.

I went through every library I could find yeasterday, so find one that can do a good job of HTML=>PDF (and by that I mean rendering HTMl, CSS images etc). And the winner...is of course the second most expensive one. I should have known that

• The most expensive one would not work (for my purposes)
• Anything cheap or free would not work for my purposes.

Therefore, the best was the second most expensive.

Drumroll...

I ruled out:

Spre Office: Html-pdf does image capture (i.e. the text is no longer live) and the the compression makes it of unsuitable quality

• PDFSharp: no Html-pdf but a nice looking library
• HTMLDOC : no css support
• ABCpdf : not good enough

And todays winner

www.evopdf.com/defalt.aspx which was, by all accounts nearly flawless. Some HTML5/CSS3 gradients and curves were less than perfecct, but to build an invoice or a datasheet it will do just fine.