PdfPecker
Docs 1.22.0: Fluent C# API
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This is the manual for PdfPecker 1.22.0. Read it for the latest version, 1.25.0.

Fluent C# API

Changed in 1.22.0: What it covers, Coming from QuestPDF.

PdfPecker.Fluent builds PDFs from C# code instead of HTML, in the style of QuestPDF. You describe pages, headers, footers, columns, rows, tables, text, images and barcodes in code; PdfPecker.Fluent writes compact HTML and CSS for them and renders it with PdfPecker. It needs no browser, no native binaries and no package other than PdfPecker.

dotnet add package PdfPecker.Fluent

It is released together with PdfPecker, always with the same version, and depends on the PdfPecker release of that version. It runs on .NET 8, 9 and 10, and is trimmable and Native AOT compatible.

using PdfPecker.Fluent;

Document.Create(container =>
{
    container.Page(page =>
    {
        page.Size(PageSizes.A4);
        page.Margin(2, Unit.Centimetre);
        page.DefaultTextStyle(x => x.FontSize(11));

        page.Header().Text("Hello PdfPecker").FontSize(20).Bold().FontColor(Colors.Blue.Darken2);

        page.Content().PaddingVertical(1, Unit.Centimetre).Column(column =>
        {
            column.Spacing(10);
            column.Item().Text("A paragraph of text.");
            column.Item().Image(File.ReadAllBytes("logo.png")).FitWidth();
        });

        page.Footer().AlignCenter().Text(x =>
        {
            x.Span("Page ");
            x.CurrentPageNumber();
            x.Span(" of ");
            x.TotalPages();
        });
    });
})
.GeneratePdf("hello.pdf");

What it covers Changed in 1.22.0

  • Layout: Column, Row, Table (row and column spans, header and footer rows repeated on every page, cell backgrounds and borders that fill the row in any call order, as in QuestPDF), padding, borders, corner radius, background, sizes, alignment, page breaks, Layers, Inlined, MultiColumn, EnsureSpace, Decoration, lists, transforms and ScaleToFit, which draws content smaller until it fits a box of fixed size, for badges and labels.
  • Text: spans with font, size, weight, colour, decoration, spacing, superscript and subscript, OpenType features, justified text, ClampLines, headings that become bookmarks, links, and page numbers and the page count anywhere: in the header, the footer and the content. Section page numbers: BeginPageNumberOfSection, EndPageNumberOfSection, TotalPagesWithinSection and PageNumberWithinSection.
  • Pages: size, margins, colour, and a header and footer on every page with page numbers. ShowOnce and SkipOnce in the header or footer give the first page a band of its own, such as a letterhead followed by a slim header. Several Page calls give page sets with their own size, margins, header and footer in one document, and page numbers, links, PDF/A, PDF/UA and signatures work across all of them.
  • Form fields and footnotes, which QuestPDF does not have: TextField (one line, multiline or password), CheckBox, RadioButton, ComboBox and ListBox become fillable PDF fields, and text.Footnote("...") numbers a note and sets it at the bottom of its page.
  • Images and graphics: PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, TIFF, GIF and SVG images, lines, and QR, EPC payment QR, Code 128 and EAN-13 barcodes.
  • Accessibility: QuestPDF's Semantic* calls write the HTML PdfPecker tags a PDF/UA document from.
  • Everything else in PdfPecker through PdfOptions: PDF/A, PDF/UA, signatures, passwords, watermarks, e-invoices, attachments and fonts.
  • Output: GeneratePdf (bytes, file or stream), GeneratePdfAsync, GenerateImages and GenerateHtml, which shows the HTML PdfPecker renders.

Text, links, colours and names you pass are encoded, so caller data never turns into markup. Html() and Css() are the exception: they insert trusted HTML and CSS as they are, for anything the fluent calls don't cover yet, so never pass user input to them.

Coming from QuestPDF Changed in 1.22.0

Most QuestPDF code ports by changing the using lines: Document.Create, Page, Header, Content, Footer, Column, Row, Table, Text, Padding, Border, Background, Align*, Width, Height and GeneratePdf have the same names. ScaleToFit, ShowOnce, SkipOnce, page numbers in the content and every section page number work too. Not available yet: Dynamic, Canvas, StopPaging, RepeatContent and ExtendLastCellsToTableBottom. The package's README lists every difference.

Coming from MigraDoc

MigraDoc builds a document as an object model (Document, Section, Paragraph, Table) and renders it through PDFsharp. With 6.5.0 (October 2026), PDFsharp and MigraDoc moved to AGPL-3.0 or a paid licence; 6.2.4 and earlier were MIT. PdfPecker.Fluent is MIT and describes the same documents in code. The usual MigraDoc calls map like this:

  • document.AddSection(), section.PageSetup become container.Page(page => ...), page.Size, page.Margin
  • section.Headers.Primary, section.Footers.Primary become page.Header(), page.Footer()
  • Headers.FirstPage with DifferentFirstPageHeaderFooter becomes ShowOnce() and SkipOnce() in the header or footer
  • AddParagraph, AddFormattedText become Text("..."), or Text(t => t.Span("...").Bold())
  • AddTable, AddColumn, AddRow become Table with ColumnsDefinition and Cell()
  • MergeRight, MergeDown become ColumnSpan, RowSpan
  • row.HeadingFormat = true becomes table.Header(...), repeated on every page
  • KeepTogether, KeepWith become PreventPageBreak(), EnsureSpace()
  • AddPageBreak becomes PageBreak()
  • AddPageField, AddNumPagesField become CurrentPageNumber(), TotalPages()
  • AddSectionPagesField, AddPageRefField become TotalPagesWithinSection, BeginPageNumberOfSection
  • AddBookmark, AddHyperlink become Section("name"), SectionLink, Hyperlink
  • AddFootnote becomes text.Footnote("...")
  • AddImage, AddTextFrame become Image, Layers or Unconstrained
  • ListInfo becomes List
  • Styles such as Normal and Heading1 become DefaultTextStyle and TextStyle objects you reuse

Not available in this version: charts, tab stops with leaders, separate headers and footers for even pages, and RTF output. What PdfPecker.Fluent adds over MigraDoc: complex scripts and right-to-left text, hyphenation, PDF/A and PDF/UA built from the layout, signatures, form fields, QR codes and output as images or HTML.

The fluent layer adds well under a millisecond to a typical document. On the same invoice, built call for call, it is about four times as fast as QuestPDF 2026.9.1, as measured in the PdfPecker.Benchmarks repository.