.NET Essentials

ABCpdf .NET is made up of the following components.

ABCpdf.dll is the main .NET assembly. When the assembly is loaded, it locates and loads an appropriate core engine establishing a direct high speed link between the two components.

ABCpdf10-32.dll and ABCpdf10-64.dll are the core engines for 32- and 64-bit processes. They incorporate our proprietary Direct to PDF technology and are designed for high performance PDF manipulation in a multithreaded environment.

PrintHook32.dll and PrintHook64.dll are print hooks for 32- and 64-bit processes. These DLLs intercept the Microsoft XPS Document Writer to allow ABCpdf to import an extended range of documents.

ABCpdf supports the import of more image formats through the separate ABCImageMagick COM+ Application, which is not automatically installed and you can manually install with ABCImageMagick.msi.

The .NET tier is placed in the GAC so that you can reference ABCpdf .NET from any of your projects. However, should you require, you can always copy both DLLs to the bin directory of your application.

You need to add a reference to ABCpdf from your Visual Studio Project.

This tells Visual Studio to link the ABCpdf assembly into the build.

If you are not using Visual Studio, you will need to consult the documentation for your chosen development environment.

There are four public namespaces in ABCpdf. You can reference these using the following directives.

[C#]
using WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10;
using WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10.Objects;
using WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10.Atoms;
using WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10.Operations;

[Visual Basic]
Imports WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10
Imports WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10.Objects
Imports WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10.Atoms
Imports WebSupergoo.ABCpdf10.Operations

The ABCpdf10 namespace contains the objects you will use for page layout. Most of the time, it is the only namespace you will need.

The Objects namespace allows you to access and manipulate content you've already added. You may use this namespace for complex operations in which the standard page layout functionality requires some modification.

The Atoms namespace allows you low level access to the raw PDF data structures. You are unlikely to use objects from this namespace unless you are writing very low level code.

The Operations namespace allows you to perform complex operations with multiple parameters and callbacks.

This is some simple example code. All it does is create a simple 'Hello World' PDF in the current working directory.

[C#]
Doc doc = new Doc();
doc.AddText("Hello World!");
doc.Save("output.pdf");

[Visual Basic]
Dim doc As New Doc()
doc.AddText("Hello World!")
doc.Save("output.pdf")


ASP.NET operates under a restricted set of security permissions. It is quite common for the ASPNET user not to be able to create or write files.

So, if you want to save a PDF file from your ASP.NET code, it is quite likely that you will need to adjust the permissions on your destination directory to allow write access for the ASPNET user.