Hey there, folks! Are you looking to create PDFs in .NET? Look no further than iTextSharp! In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to get started with this powerful library.

But first, let me tell you what iTextSharp is.

iTextSharp is a popular open-source PDF library for .NET, which allows developers to create, manipulate, and edit PDF documents. It was originally developed by Bruno Lowagie in 2000 and is currently maintained by a team of developers.

iTextSharp is based on the Java iText library, which was also developed by Bruno Lowagie. The original iText library was released under the Affero General Public License (AGPL), a free software license. However, iTextSharp was released under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3, which means that any software that uses or includes iTextSharp must also be released under the same license.

In addition to the open-source version, iText also offers a commercially licensed version of the library called iText 7, which has additional features and support.

Overall, iTextSharp is a powerful and flexible PDF library for .NET developers, and its popularity has grown over the years due to its ease of use and robust functionality.

Let’s get started

Step 1: Download iTextSharp First things first, you’ll need to download iTextSharp. You can download the latest version from the iTextSharp website or using NuGet. Make sure to add the iTextSharp reference to your project.

Step 2: Create a PDF Document To create a PDF document, you’ll need to create an instance of the Document class. You can specify the page size, margins, and other properties when you create the document.

// create a new PDF document
Document document = new Document(PageSize.LETTER, 50, 50, 25, 25);

Step 3: Add Content to the PDF Now that you have a document, it’s time to add some content. You can add text, images, and other elements to the document using the various classes in iTextSharp.

// create a new paragraph
Paragraph paragraph = new Paragraph("Hello, world!");

// add the paragraph to the document
document.Add(paragraph);

Step 4: Save the PDF Document Once you’ve added all the content to your PDF document, you can save it to a file or stream.

// create a new FileStream object
FileStream fileStream = new FileStream("output.pdf", FileMode.Create);

// create a new PdfWriter object
PdfWriter pdfWriter = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, fileStream);

// open the document
document.Open();

// add content to the document
// ...

// close the document
document.Close();

// close the FileStream
fileStream.Close();

And that’s it! With iTextSharp, you can easily create PDFs in .NET. Happy coding!