Comment by BaRRaKID | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BaRRaKID | Hacker News Reader

Are people really OK with writing code in C# for data presentation? How is it fine having to compile code when you want to change a font colour for example?

And just from looking at the examples you can see how quickly it becomes messy. It looks like something that would work fine for very simple document structures but would get messy really fast once you add any level of complexity. Imagine having to write code for a document with multiple levels of headings, tables and images with captions, parts of text that need emphasis, etc.

From my experience the best solution for generating PDFs in .NET are, as mentioned here before, wkhtmltopdf wrappers. Take a Razor view, add some document properties (page size, margins, headers, footers, etc) in code, and output to a PDF.

I would even argue that on desktop using Office APIs to populate word documents and output them to PDF is more efficient than this.

The concept of writing the presentation layer in the actual programming language isn't new. Flutter developed by Google is a great example.

It all depends on how you structure your code. Of course, you can create huge chunks of HTML+CSS that cover your entire document. Or, to improve maintainability, you can split that HTML into multiple components and compose them together.

Very similar rules can be applied to this library, where you split your code into smaller parts by using properly named methods. That gives you better understandding on the structure and ways to traverse the implementation.

Futhermore, using a programming language gives you many benefits. You can rely on all language features like loops, conditions, methods, formatting, recursion, etc. You have access to IntelliSense, static analysis and refectoring tools.

In terms of changing the layout content - it would be equally difficult when using any markup language. After all, you don't want to parse markup file every time you generate PDF - for performance reasons.

HTML may be a good choice for relatively simple documents, where you don't care that much about splitting content between pages, etc. However, you still will fight with performance problems related to running entire web browser.

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