Convert a Document to PDF

The ability to easily and reliably convert documents from one format to another is a key feature of Aspose.Words. One of the most popular formats for converting is PDF – a fixed-layout format, which preserves the original appearance of a document during its rendering on various platforms. The “rendering” term is used in Aspose.Words to describe the process of converting a document into a file format that is paginated or has the concept of pages.

Convert a Word Document to PDF

Conversion from Word to PDF is a rather complex process that requires several stages of calculation. Aspose.Words layout engine mimics the way the Microsoft Word’s page layout engine works, making PDF output documents look as close as possible to what you can see in Microsoft Word.

With Aspose.Words you can programmatically convert a document from Word formats, such as DOC or DOCX, to PDF without using Microsoft Office. This article explains how to perform this conversion.

Convert DOCX or DOC to PDF

Converting from the DOC or DOCX document format into the PDF format in Aspose.Words is very easy and can be accomplished with just two lines of code that:

  1. Load your document into a Document object using one of its constructors by specifying the document name with its format extension.
  2. Invoke one of the Document.Save methods on the Document object and specify the desired output format as PDF by entering a file name with the “.PDF” extension.

The following code example shows how to convert a document from DOCX into PDF using the Save method:

You can download the template file of this example from Aspose.Words GitHub.

Convert to Different PDF Standards

Aspose.Words provides the PdfCompliace enumeration to support the conversion of DOC or DOCX into various PDF format standards (such as PDF 1.7, PDF 1.5, etc.).

The following code example demonstrates how to convert a document to PDF 1.7 using PdfSaveOptions with compliance to PDF17:

Convert Images to PDF

Converting to PDF is not restricted by Microsoft Word document formats. Any format supported by Aspose.Words, including programmatically created, can also be converted to PDF. For example, we can convert single-page images, such as JPEG, PNG, BMP, EMF, or WMF, as well as multi-page images, such as TIFF and GIF, to PDF.

The following code example shows how to convert JPEG and TIFF images to PDF:

.NET

// Convert image in a specified format to PDF.
ConvertImageToPdf(dataDir + "Test.jpg", dataDir + "TestJpg_out.pdf");
ConvertImageToPdf(dataDir + "Test.tiff", dataDir + "TestTif_out.pdf");

.NET

public void ConvertImageToPdf(string inputFileName, string outputFileName)
{
	// Create Document and DocumentBuilder.
	// The builder makes it simple to add content to the document.
	Document doc = new Document();
	DocumentBuilder builder = new DocumentBuilder(doc);

	// Read the image from file, ensure it is disposed.
	using (Image image = Image.FromFile(inputFileName))
	{
		// Find which dimension the frames in this image represent. For example
	    // The frames of a BMP or TIFF are "page dimension" whereas frames of a GIF image are "time dimension". 
	    FrameDimension dimension = new FrameDimension(image.FrameDimensionsList[0]);
	
	    // Get the number of frames in the image.
	    int framesCount = image.GetFrameCount(dimension);
	
	    // Loop through all frames.
		for (int frameIdx = 0; frameIdx < framesCount; frameIdx++)
		{
	    	// Insert a section break before each new page, in case of a multi-frame TIFF.
	        if (frameIdx != 0)
	        	builder.InsertBreak(BreakType.SectionBreakNewPage);
	
	    	// Select active frame.
	    	image.SelectActiveFrame(dimension, frameIdx);
	
	        // We want the size of the page to be the same as the size of the image.
		    // Convert pixels to points to size the page to the actual image size.
	    	PageSetup ps = builder.PageSetup;
	    	ps.PageWidth = ConvertUtil.PixelToPoint(image.Width, image.HorizontalResolution);
	        ps.PageHeight = ConvertUtil.PixelToPoint(image.Height, image.VerticalResolution);
	
	        // Insert the image into the document and position it at the top left corner of the page.
		    builder.InsertImage(
	    	    image,
	            RelativeHorizontalPosition.Page,
	            0,
		        RelativeVerticalPosition.Page,
	    	    0,
	        	ps.PageWidth,
	 	       	ps.PageHeight,
	 	       	WrapType.None);
		}
	}
	
	// Save the document to PDF.
	doc.Save(outputFileName);
}

To make this code work, you need to add references to Aspose.Words and System.Drawing to your project.

See Also

Convert a Document to HTML, MHTML or EPUB in C#