Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm currently building an open source (not copyleft) PDF library for.NET standard [0] and I'd be interested to hear more what you need on the document generation side. The current generation API for my library is extremely limited because I've never needed one but you are the perfect market research participant. It's an API I'm actively looking to improve. PDF/A compliance is probably quite a way off though. [0]: htt…
wow that looks really nice. actually we mostly do html to pdf, but maybe I can look into your project and try to add it (if there is a nice html/dom library like java has with jsoup). basically we don't need a lot, mostly switch fonts/text sizes/images (generated barcodes, logos) and of course pdf/a-3(a/b/u) for invoice. so apis that translate the html into the layouting of pdf is the bigger problem.
Yeah HTML to PDF is a tricky one, presumably wkhtmltopdf/pechkin doesn't work out because of licensing / interop issues? Other than that the only other one I'm aware of is Aspose which is expensive as you say.
Images (along with font subsetting and fixing the gzip implementation) are the next thing I plan to implement so it's helpful to know its a real requirement.