How to print a PDF with C#

Question

I´ve trying to solve this problem for nearly 2 days. There are a lot of more or fewer good solutions on the net, but not a single one fits my task perfectly.

Task:

• Print a PDF programmatically
• Do it with a fixed printer
• Don´t let the user do more than one Button_Click
• Do it silent - the more, the better
• Do it client side

First Solutions:

Do it with a Forms.WebBrowser

If we have Adobe Reader installed, there is a plugin to show PDF´s in the webbrowser. With this solution we have a nice preview and with webbrowserControlName.Print() we can trigger the control to print its content.

Problem - we still have a PrintDialog.

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Start the AcroRd32.exe with start arguments

The following CMD command let us use Adobe Reader to print our PDF.

InsertPathTo..\AcroRd32.exe /t "C:\sample.pdf" "\printerNetwork\printerName"

Problems - we need the absolute path to AcroRd32.exe | there is an Adobe Reader Window opening and it has to be opened until the print task is ready.

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Use windows presets

Process process = new Process();

process.StartInfo.FileName = pathToPdf; 
process.StartInfo.Verb = "printto";
process.StartInfo.Arguments = "\"" + printerName + "\""; 
process.Start();

process.WaitForInputIdle();
process.Kill();

Problem - there is still an Adobe Reader window popping up, but after the printing is done it closes itself usually.

Solution - convince the client to use Foxit Reader (don´t use last two lines of code).

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Convert PDF pages to Drawing.Image

I´ve no idea how to do it with code, but when I get this to work the rest is just a piece of cake. Printing.PrintDocument can fulfill all demands.

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Anyone an idea to get some Drawing.Image´s out of those PDF´s or another approach how to do it?

Best Regards, Max

Answer 1

The most flexible, easiest and best performing method I could find was using GhostScript. It can print to windows printers directly by printer name.

"C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.07\bin\gswin64c.exe" -dPrinted -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=mswinpr2 -dNoCancel -sOutputFile="%printer%printer name" "pdfdocument.pdf"

Add these switches to shrink the document to an A4 page.

-sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dPDFFitPage

Answer 2

Another approach would to use spooler function in .NET to send the pre-formatted printer data to a printer. But unfortunately you need to work with win32 spooler API

you can look at How to send raw data to a printer by using Visual C# .NET

you only can use this approach when the printer support PDF document natively.