MigraDoc: First Steps

Modified on 2013/09/10 17:32 by Thomas Hövel — Categorized as: Articles, MigraDoc Articles

Both PDFsharp and MigraDoc provide a lot of AddXxx functions. Typically these functions return the newly created objects. Once you’ve learned the basic principles it’s quite easy to work with. Intellisense helps a lot then. And the new help system that integrates with the Visual Studio online help will provide information about any class in PDFsharp and MigraDoc – simply by hitting F1.

MigraDoc - Getting Started¶

A good place to start is the Samples folder that comes with the source code. This wiki also shows the MigraDoc Samples.

We’ll discuss a few lines of the Hello World sample here.

We start with a new document:

Document document = new Document();

With MigraDoc, we don’t add pages, we add sections (at least one):

Section section = document.AddSection();

Adding text is simple:

section.AddParagraph("Hello, World!");

Adding empty paragraphs is even simpler:

section.AddParagraph();

Store the newly created object for modification:

Paragraph paragraph = section.AddParagraph();
paragraph.Format.Font.Color = Color.FromCmyk(100, 30, 20, 50);
paragraph.AddFormattedText("Hello, World!", TextFormat.Underline);

AddFormattedText also returns an object:

FormattedText ft = paragraph.AddFormattedText("Small text",
  TextFormat.Bold);
ft.Font.Size = 6;

And there’s much more that can be added: AddTable, AddImage, AddHyperlink, AddBookmark, AddPageField, AddPageBreak, ...

With MigraDoc you can create PDF or RTF. Just select the appropriate renderer:

PdfDocumentRenderer pdfRenderer = new PdfDocumentRenderer(false,
  PdfFontEmbedding.Always);

Pass the document to the renderer:

pdfRenderer.Document = document;

Let the renderer do its job:

pdfRenderer.RenderDocument();

Save the PDF to a file:

string filename = "HelloWorld.pdf";
pdfRenderer.PdfDocument.Save(filename);

A PC application might show the file:

Process.Start(filename);