HTML to PDF or DOC

[edwinparker]

I'm currently working on a ASP.NET (C#) web application to process bids. Right now the user will enter in some rich text into a textbox (I'm using FreeTextBox for this) and the text gets saved as HTML to a MYSQL database. I need some suggestions on how to take this HTML and put it into either a PDF or Word. The problem I'm having is keeping the formatting like it would show in a browser, but have it in a PDF.

For example I might grab something like this from the database
<ul>
<li><font face="Century Gothic" size="2">Image</font></li>
<li><font face="Century Gothic" size="2">Question</font></li>
<li><font face="Century Gothic" size="2">Answer</font></li>
</ul>
and that's what will get put into a PDF or Word. I need it to retain the formatting as if it were viewed in a browser but inside a PDF or Word DOC. Does anyone have any suggestions for this?

I've done lots of searching on the Internet for possible solutions to this, but so far I have not found anything that will do what I need it to. All the PDF plug-ins seem to just insert the text, I need it to insert HTML and not see the tags, but see the formatting of the tags.

Thanks for any help. If you need any more details I can post more information/code/etc

[Motoma]

I'm currently working on a ASP.NET (C#) web application to process bids. Right now the user will enter in some rich text into a textbox (I'm using FreeTextBox for this) and the text gets saved as HTML to a MYSQL database. I need some suggestions on how to take this HTML and put it into either a PDF or Word. The problem I'm having is keeping the formatting like it would show in a browser, but have it in a PDF.

For example I might grab something like this from the database
<ul>
<li><font face="Century Gothic" size="2">Image</font></li>
<li><font face="Century Gothic" size="2">Question</font></li>
<li><font face="Century Gothic" size="2">Answer</font></li>
</ul>
and that's what will get put into a PDF or Word. I need it to retain the formatting as if it were viewed in a browser but inside a PDF or Word DOC. Does anyone have any suggestions for this?

I've done lots of searching on the Internet for possible solutions to this, but so far I have not found anything that will do what I need it to. All the PDF plug-ins seem to just insert the text, I need it to insert HTML and not see the tags, but see the formatting of the tags.

Thanks for any help. If you need any more details I can post more information/code/etc

There are two ways you could do this with a PDF. The first would be to completely build the page in the PDF, formatting, text, images would all need to be placed. The second would be to load up a PDF with the layout you desire, and then overlay the text onto that. I have not used PDF generation in .NET, so I do not know how easily this could be done.
You may be able to do this easier in Word using a COM call to load up an HTML page, and then save it in as a .doc file.

[Motoma]

If you didn't have the requirement of taking raw HTML (and maybe even if you do), you could try using Crystal Reports to do this.