QuestPDF/QuestPDF 2022.8

QuestPDF 2022.8 release notes

on GitHub

QuestPDF is an open-source .NET library for PDF documents generation.

It offers a layouting engine designed with a full paging support in mind. The document consists of many simple elements (e.g. border, background, image, text, padding, table, grid etc.) that are composed together to create more complex structures. This way, as a developer, you can understand the behavior of every element and use them with full confidence. Additionally, the document and all its elements support paging functionality. For example, an element can be moved to the next page (if there is not enough space) or even be split between pages like table's rows.

To learn how easy it is to design documents with the library, let's quickly analyse the code below:

using QuestPDF.Fluent;
using QuestPDF.Helpers;
using QuestPDF.Infrastructure;

// code in your main method
Document.Create(container =>
{
    container.Page(page =>
    {
        page.Size(PageSizes.A4);
        page.Margin(2, Unit.Centimetre);
        page.PageColor(Colors.White);
        page.DefaultTextStyle(x => x.FontSize(20));
        
        page.Header()
            .Text("Hello PDF!")
            .SemiBold().FontSize(36).FontColor(Colors.Blue.Medium);
        
        page.Content()
            .PaddingVertical(1, Unit.Centimetre)
            .Column(x =>
            {
                x.Spacing(20);
                
                x.Item().Text(Placeholders.LoremIpsum());
                x.Item().Image(Placeholders.Image(200, 100));
            });
        
        page.Footer()
            .AlignCenter()
            .Text(x =>
            {
                x.Span("Page ");
                x.CurrentPageNumber();
            });
    });
})
.GeneratePdf("hello.pdf");

And compare it to the produced PDF file:

Popularity milestone

The QuestPDF nuget package has reached over 250 thousands of downloads! I was dreaming about helping the community for years, about giving something back and be a part of the ecosystem development. This is not simple: requires tons of time and proper planning. But numbers are not lying! My hard work is beneficial to many of you. Thank you for your support!

⭐ Please consider giving this repository a star. It takes seconds and help thousands of developers! ⭐

JetBrains help and performance optimization

The QuestPDF project received an enormous help from JetBrains over last months.

The library was shown during one of episodes of the OSS Power-Ups program hosted by Matthias Koch. This gave me a fresh energy to develop new great features.

Moreover, I got a change to cooperate with Maarten Balliauw, perform a detailed performance analysis and apply multiple fixes. To read more about this effort, please take a look at this fantastic article. Many of the improvements are already applied, making the library faster and more reliable for everyone. Some are inspiration for more fundamental changes that should significantly reduce resource utilization in the nearest future.

Dear JetBrains team, thank you for helping me making the library flourish, for promoting it across entire the .NET community, for your great patience and professionalism, and finally for making our industry a fantastic place to work.

Documentation update

The QuestPDF documentation is written manually as MarkDown files. Those files are then compiled together to create a webpage.

I decided to change the documentation engine from VuePress to VitePress. This makes the webpage much faster, improves its look and feel, as well as increases usability.

Also, the old documentation structure has been designed nearly two years ago. Since then, the documentation grew over three times in size. Therefore, I have also decided to update its hierarchy, so it should be easier to traverse and find what you need.

The next step is to rewrite all articles, make descriptions more accurate and provide more examples.

New default font (breaking change)

In this release, I decided to change the default font from Calibri to Lato. Lato is an open-source, free for commercial use font created by Polish author Łukasz Dziedzic.

The font is distributed with the library as embedded resource and part of the dll file / nuget package. This way, as long as you use the default font, you have it available on all environments. Also, the font is around 20x smaller, this should reduce substantially PDF file size (1.57 MB -> 74 KB) when using the default font.

Of course there is caveat, this font does not contain more advanced glyphs, e.g. for Arabic/Chinese/Japanese languages, or for advanced unicode formatting. For such cases, you still need to use a font with proper support.

This effort solves two issues:

1. Makes sure that your code works on all environments (in terms of font availability). You don't get exceptions from a family of "Calibri is not available on Linux by default", etc.
2. The average PDF output size will decrease drastically for most projects. In many cases, this will reduce the need of font subsetting. Of course, in the average case.

Others

Improved: if you use the font that is not available in the runtime environment, the exception thrown by QuestPDF provides all fonts available.

Fixed: a rare case when the Inlined element throws the layout overflow exception when generating PDF document.

Fixed: memory leak introduced in the 2022.6 release connected to the HarfBuzzSharp library usage.

Fixed: page breaking rendering does not work in very specific corner cases