ABCPdf is a PDF creation, manipulation library from www.websupergoo.com. I have to say it’s a fantastic piece of software.

First, it’s a standalone library which doesn’t have any third-party dependency for most of its features and all features are contained in two DLLs. This is important because this will greatly simplify the deploy process. And even better, with such a small footprint, ABCPdf managed to support the latest PDF Spec and a lot of great features.

Second, ease of use. We used iTextSharp which is an Open Source PDF library. It’s OK. But it lacks a lot of features and has no PDF rendering capabilities built in. We then tried to use another Open Source library which is xpdf for extracting images. It’s hard to use. E.g., to extracting images, you have to manually manipulate the raw binary data which is of course a pain in almost every language, even more so for C# or other .NET languages. You literally have to use Managed C++ to write a wrapper for xpdf and then call it from .NET. Then we bumped into ABCPdf when we were looking for other choices and it’s really a joyful experience. And we fell in love easily. With less than one hour, I can extract images from PDF files. And it’s just one of the many handy features in ABCPdf. The most important thing is that it’s written in .NET and it has a nicely organized object hierarchy which makes it easy for .NET developers to interact with PDF on no matter what level. You can deal with Page easily with Page API. You can drill deep down to get the raw data if you like. It gives you the ease of use without losing control.

Last, but not least, ABCPdf’s licensing fee is reasonable. For iTextSharp 5.0, with much less features, we have to pay an unbelievable $5000 at minimum for just 1 year license which is of course not affordable for a micro startup like us. But ABCPdf is here to save us. Thanks Websupergoo for producing such a great software. It’s appreciated.