Using iText to generate PDF from Html using HtmlWorker

Someone asked this on Google+ and I had a program that did it so I decided to turn it into a quick blog post.  I stripped away the application specific logic, but this is the gist of the iText code. (Technically this is iTextSharp, but I’m guessing it will work in iText as well.)  The trick is to use the HtmlWorker. (If I remember right, there’s a newer XMLWorkerHelper object that’s newer/better.)

This returns the PDF in a memory stream (useful for sending to the Response object to send to a browser):

using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.text.html.simpleparser;

public static Stream RenderPDF()

{

    Document document = new Document(PageSize.LETTER, 36F, 36F, 36F, 36F);
    MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
    PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, memoryStream);
    document.Open();

    HTMLWorker htmlWorker = new HTMLWorker(document);
    var sectionTitleFont = new Font(Font.FontFamily.TIMES_ROMAN, 24, Font.BOLD, BaseColor.BLACK);
    var sectionTitleParagraph = new Paragraph(“Title text”, sectionTitleFont);

    document.Add(sectionTitleParagraph);

    document.NewPage();

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    string strBody = ”

This is the paragraph body

“;
    sb.AppendLine(strBody);
    sb.AppendLine(“”);

    htmlWorker.Parse(new StringReader(sb.ToString()));
    document.NewPage();

    writer.CloseStream = false;
    document.Close();
    memoryStream.Position = 0;
    return memoryStream;

}