PDFsharp - moved to http://forum.pdfsharp.net/

standgale · Joined: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 7

Surely there must be a way of getting the size of things like tables in migradoc/pdfsharp.
I am making tables and paragraphs, etc, with the Migradoc libraries and then placing them with pdfsharp. But, some of these elements can be different sizes depending on what is going in them, or, more likely, I might want to miss them out altogether.
How can I find out how big everything is to work out where to position things on my pages? I want to decide if I should put a particular table/image/paragraph on this page, or start a new page and put it there. I can't see anything obvious to either find out the size or test if something will fit and find out if it did or not.

PeterGillespie · Joined: 14 Oct 2008 Posts: 8 Location: England

The reason this is quite difficult to accomplish is because until the objects are rendered in memory they cannot know thier final height. When we take into account all the factors such as font sizes, table widths, table padding, word wrapping, Page size etc.. until the object knows about each of these factors it cannot tell you how its going to end up looking.

So it is not until they are rendered and all of these pieces are brought together that the height is known. Think of it like getting all the pieces of car laid out on the floor in front of you, not until you build it do you know what it looks like.

My solution to this was to use the document renderer to render the object in memory (but not actually write it to a page) and return its height. This is a very expensive operation because you are effectively rendering the object twice, once to get its height and again to add it to the page.

Thanks

Pete