Quest for Permissively Licensed PDF Library in C#

Archelaos

I create PDF files from C# using LaTeX as an intermediate format. This works very reliable but sometimes takes a bit of tinkering until everything fits.

People here on HN recently recommended Typst as a replacement for LaTeX, but I haven't tried it myself yet.

actionfromafar

I my eyes, PdfSharpCore¹ is now the "canonical" version of pdfcore.

IMHO the list is incomplete without it.

1: https://github.com/ststeiger/PdfSharpCore

eXpl0it3r

It seems the PDFSharp rabbit hole goes even deeper than I've realized!

Latest MigraDoc & PDFSharp seem to have been updated and ported to .NET 6 after a lot of the forks happened, so it was unclear to me whether there's merits in looking at other, mostly abandoned forks.

I might add PdfSharpCore, though the use of SixLabors.ImageSharp and SixLabors.Fonts leads to a disqualification from the "quest", given their custom split license [1]

Edit: Actually, the license seems to turn into an Apache 2.0 license, when used with an open source licensed project and also as transitive dependency. Certainly a confusing license.

[1] https://github.com/SixLabors/ImageSharp/blob/main/LICENSE

actionfromafar

Edit: PSA - PdfSharpCore uses older releases of SixLabors.ImageSharp v1.0.4 and Fonts-1.0.0-beta17 which both were (and are still) distributed under plain Apache-2.0.

https://web.archive.org/web/20251104163604/https://codeload....

eXpl0it3r

Good to know, thank you!

Though, makes me wonder how much "old code" this is then collecting...