We have many pdf libraries that we can use, but none of them are perfect and all of them have some advantages and disadvantages. Here is my little experience with generating PDF file in .net framework with generating reports both, in a browser on demand and large numbers in bash/console by night.
Crystal_Reports - big, commercial library develop by big company
Pros:
- can be really fast
Cons:
- ugly (at least not pretty) reports
- works on my machine issue (your report can be seen different in different machine, in example on server what can be frustrating when troubleshooting).
SQL_Server_Reporting_Services - big library that comes with commercial licence for MS SQL Server
Pros:
- quite pretty
- have many in common with office / excel, so you BI can help you in building reports
- can use custom fonts
Cons:
Local Mode:
- have memory leaks (you will see it when you try generate PDF in large numbers)
- more complicated reports can be really slow (reporting services team upgrading reporting services from .net 3.5 to 4.0 made bug with grouping rows in table).
- don't have justify text
- you can't "copy/paste" document from MS Word
Server Mode:
- sometimes there are issue with authentication and priviliges
- you can't use collection of your objects as data source (it was a reason why I choose Local Mode).
- don't have justify text
- you can't "copy/paste" document from MS Word
Wkhtmltopdf - open source library made by google for converting html into pdf
Pros:
- quite fast
Cons:
- graph from jQuery library are medium quality (in magnification you can see pixels)
- few options for editing text
MS Word Interop - native MS Word API for CRUD operations in word documents
Pros:
- best MS Word document projection
Cons:
- slow
- need to have MS Office Word installed on working machine
- requires a little work and workarounds when we want to use it from task scheduler ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1006923/automating-office-via-windows-service-on-server-2008/1680214#1680214 )
- requires a much more work when we want to use it from IIS
Telerik - Kendo-UI - commercial library to creating great html, and export it to pdf
Pros:
- quite pretty
- write html and just export it into pdf
Cons:
- have trouble with custom fonts
- pdf generation could be faster
