QuestPDF VS lxml

What is QuestPDF? QuestPDF is an open-source .NET library for PDF document generation. It uses a fluent API approach to compose together many simple elements to create complex documents.

QuestPDF looks really good (I haven't used it) but I believe they changed their license recently.

I used that same library it worked great the only issue I had was the users would often have to manually set the scaling to fit to a page. I'm sure I could've fixed this in other ways if I was more competent with CSS but ended up just switching to use https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF in a backend instead of doing everything in front end.

Give this a try: QuestPDF

I think you should ask these questions in related discussion on Github: https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF/discussions/491

May I introduce you to QuestPDF!

➡️ James Newton-King ♔ on Twitter: "Coming in .NET 8: Route tooling for ASP.NET Core" / Twitter ➡️ Announcing .NET Community Toolkit 8.1 ➡️ Uno Platform 4.7 – New Project Template, Performance Improvements and more ➡️ C# Advent 2022 Awards | Cross Cutting Concerns ➡️ GitHub - QuestPDF ➡️ DNF Summit 2023 ➡️ .NET Frontend Day

Like many have suggested, I also cast my vote on QuestPDF. No more +50MB library including a Chrome browser to render HTML so a PDF of it can be created, which took 2-3 seconds each time. But with QuestPDF, it's so much faster!

Also, the library is open-source, so you can take a look at the exact implementation of the layout engine. It is inspired by Flutter and WPF, though optimized for pageable content: https://github.com/QuestPDF/QuestPDF/tree/main/Source/QuestPDF/Elements

lxml

Parsel is a library build to extract data from XML/HTML documents with XPath and CSS selectors support, and could be combined with regular expressions. It's usees lxml parser under the hood by default.

So, now that I no longer work in that industry, and I had some free time, I created a lazy parsing package using lxml instead of the xml parser in the standard library, which can help people who want to have a python only parsing solution.

Seriously, use LXML.

I got curious about this now so I did some tests on my own, and it appears that the XML parser implementation in Python does indeed strip all newline characters from attributes. Whether this is according to XML standard I do not know; I also briefly tried an alternative XML implementation for Python and it behaves the same, so I would assume that this is standard behavior, but I'm not knowledgable enough about XML to say for certain.

I use lxml for the XML parsing and pyodbc as the ODBC library. We have a small team so I just keep it as simple as possible: 1. A cursor yields the XML documents from a SQL query as a stream 2. A generator function parses the XML document and yields the rows (you could parallelize this step) 3. Stream each of the resulting rows to a single CSV file 4. Scoop up the resulting CSV file into the target database (usually with the DB engine's loader; bulk insert isn't so fast over ODBC) It ends up being a straight forward, low-overhead approach.

If that sounds too weird maybe take a look at pycomm3, python also has lxml as well as requests. You could write a script that retrieves the data from the clx using the appropriate pycomm3 driver for cplx and then do xml things with the data using lxml and transmit the data over http using requests.