Developer Guide

PDFRasterizer.NET is a 100% .NET (verifiable) solution for printing PDF documents unattended and converting PDF documents to a raster image, WPF graphics or an XPS document.

This developer guide will help you understand the PDFRasterizer.NET class library. It walks through the main concepts and illustrates them with code samples.

What is new

Only medium or high trust required (was full trust in 2.1)
Progressive drawing
Cancellable drawing
Asynchronous drawing
Convert to (multi-page) color TIFF (was only Black&White in 2.1)
LZW compression for TIFF output
More advanced font substitution
Convert to XPS
Convert to WPF graphics
Extract embedded files (also known as attachments)
Layer support
Diagnostics

Licensing

PDFRasterizer.NET 3.0 runs either in licensed or unlicensed mode. It runs in licensed mode if a valid license key is registered.

In unlicensed mode, rendered pages are stamped with an evaluation notice. Extracted images have a red cross imposed. When converting to WPF, only the first page is converted normally. All other pages are rendered as a single raster image so no vector graphics are preserved.

Restrictions

The following restrictions appy to PDFRasterizer.NET 3.0:

Dynamic XFA documents are not supported
Due to GDI+ and XPS restrictions, only the most basic form of transparency is supported
Overprint and rendering intents are ignored
Function-based shadings (type 1) are not supported
Free-form Gouraud-shaded triangle meshes (type 4) are not supported
Lattice-form Gouraud-shaded triangle meshes (type 5) are not supported
Coons patch meshes (type 6) are not supported
Tensor-product patch meshes (type 7) are not supported
When printing, spool jobs may be very large due to conversion of glyphs to curves. This happens when there is no matching system font installed and no font substitution if configured. See also Text and Fonts