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Posts tagged with 'PdfSharp'

We take the internet for granted. I can send information to just about anyone without a stamp, without ink, without waiting for a truck to come pick it up.

However, some parts of the world are still mired in actual paper work, for whatever reason: legal lag, technology costs, fear of change, etc. So, despite the fact that I can book a hotel, refill my prescriptions, start an LLC, and a thousand other things over the web, there are often times where I still have to send faxes, sign documents with a pen, and lick envelopes.

I have come up with some ways of insulating myself from some of these primitive forms of communication. Often this means I have to take a PDF, print out one page, sign it, scan it, and then reconstruct that PDF. Or, with an expense report, I'll take multiple scans/photos of receipts and have to stitch them together into one PDF. A long time ago, I couldn't figure out how to actually stitch PDFs together into one document without something like Adobe Acrobat installed (which I don't want to buy and don't want to install). So, I created a little tool that I called MattDoc.

I called it that because it needed a name and I was in a hurry (as you'll see by the interface). I have decided to make this tool open source, as part of my ongoing code garage sale.

Here's how it works. Suppose I have three PDF files: page1.pdf, page2.pdf, and page3.pdf. I want a single PDF that consists of these three documents in series. I click "Browse" to add each file, in order. Then I click "Save to 1 PDF". PdfSharp does the work here. It also works with images.

MattDoc screenshot

The UI is very unpolished. It could use some work, and a couple more features (for instance, right now there's no way to reorder or remove files from the list).

Hopefully this will help you stitch documents together (or maybe there's a much easier way that I don't know about) or maybe this will help you try out PdfSharp for the first time.

P.S. If you check out the git history, you'll see that I wrote this before NuGet was really a thing (or at least a thing I knew how to use): I've been using it and getting value out of it that long.

Matthew D. Groves

About the Author

Matthew D. Groves lives in Central Ohio. He works remotely, loves to code, and is a Microsoft MVP.

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