Sooner or later you’ll face the need to create a PDF document programmatically, from your C# code. It is totally possible with the help of iTextSharp library.

iTextSharp is available via NuGet, so just add it in you project:

iTextSharp via NuGet

And now you can use it like this:

  1. Prepare some font objects, like one for normal paragraphs, one for bold ones, one for headers and so on;
  2. Create a document object;
  3. Fill it with some content.

Here’s how you can define a font:

string normal_font = Path.Combine(
    Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Fonts),
    "verdana.ttf" // that means, that we will use Verdana font
    // look for more fonts in your system
    );
FontFactory.Register(normal_font);
BaseFont baseFont_normal = BaseFont.CreateFont(
    normal_font,
    BaseFont.IDENTITY_H,
    BaseFont.NOT_EMBEDDED
    );
Font font_main = new Font(baseFont_normal, 10, Font.NORMAL);

Now we have font_main object that can be used in our document.

Document is created like this:

using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(PATH-TO-THE-FILE, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None))
using (Document doc = new Document(PageSize.A4, 80, 80, 70, 70)) // some layout settings
using (PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, fs))
{
    writer.ViewerPreferences = PdfWriter.HideMenubar;
    doc.Open();
    
    // document's content goes here

    doc.Close();
}

Filling it with content is being done by simple statements like:

doc.Add(new Paragraph("Some text", font_main));

Note, how we’re using font_main for that paragraph.

Paragraphs can have different alignment, so it might be useful to create a function for that:

static Paragraph createAlignedParagraph(string text, Font font, int alignment)
{
    Paragraph p = new Paragraph(text, font);
    p.Alignment = alignment;
    return p;
}

And now we can create center-aligned paragraph like this:

doc.Add(createAlignedParagraph("Some text", font_main, Element.ALIGN_CENTER));

You can also fill some meta-information:

doc.AddTitle("Attack on Numbani");
doc.AddSubject("Match results");
doc.AddKeywords("pdf, example");
doc.AddCreator("Overwatch");
doc.AddAuthor("Athena");

Which will be stored in the document properties:

PDF document properties

To make it easier for you, I’ve created a simple console application that produces the following PDF document:

Some PDF document

The source code of the application is available here.