what's a good enterprise level pdf generation solution?

Question

I'd like to find a replacement for Crystal Reports. Oh how I dislike CR.

Ideally I'd like to find a PDF generation tool that has the following:

• Solid API in .NET
• Speed: we'd like to generate 1000-2500 pdfs per day
• WYSIWYG editor
• hotlinking of image files (logos)
• good widow/orphan control
• reasonably good typography control (kerning)
• repeatable fields (like you'd see in a bank statement)
• easy to push data in from xml data, datasets or direct sql queries
• size: final size of the pdf files matters because these will go in a database eventually
• price: free is not always a good price; paying for the right solution is far better than paying developers to build the right solution from an almost-right solution

The WYSIWYG editor is especially important. I'd prefer to be able to hand a tool to my designer-ish person, have them build the document and place the database fields where they are supposed to be, then hand it back to me so I can link it up to the database.

Similar to this question, but I felt that question was too vague

Answer 1

JasperReports doesn't do what you want?

(If your reports contains always the same type of data, you could use iText(Sharp). You spend some time tuning the design by code - tedious, i know -, but afterwards it's only a matter of importing data)

Answer 2

DevExpress XtraReports do fantastic report generation, savable in pdf obviously. I use it to generate Medical reports in one of the programs that I work on. You can build the reports programmatically or via their design time GUI (They also have an end user GUI that lets reports be created/edited).

http://devexpress.com/Products/NET/Reporting/

Answer 3

I think you have two different things here:

1. A PDF editor. Might as well go with Acrobat.
2. PDF server technology. This really depends on what the rest of your stack looks like but we use PDFSharp successfully. If your not doing that much manipulation or it's more generic, I think Adobe makes "Adobe Distiller Server". You should look at both.