Getting started

Install the package and produce your first PDF in under five minutes.

Rivoli PDF is an in-process .NET PDF library: no Ghostscript, no headless browser, nothing to install at the OS level and no external process to shell out to. Layout and PDF writing are pure managed code; raster image work goes through SkiaSharp, whose native assets NuGet restores for you (see the FAQ for the platform matrix, including Alpine/musl). You build a document tree in memory and write it to a PDF. This page gets you from an empty project to a real file on disk.

Install

Rivoli PDF ships as three packages: Rivoli.Pdf.Core (the document model and builders), Rivoli.Pdf (the PDF writer), and the optional Rivoli.Pdf.Html (HTML to PDF conversion):

dotnet add package Rivoli.Pdf.Core
dotnet add package Rivoli.Pdf

The packages target .NET 8 and .NET 10 and run on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Hello, PDF

A complete program that produces a one-paragraph PDF:

using Rivoli.Pdf;
using Rivoli.Pdf.Builders;
using Rivoli.Pdf.Model;

var doc = Document.Create("Hello", "Rivoli.Pdf");
doc.DefaultPageSize = PageSize.A4;
doc.DefaultMargin = Margin.Standard;

var section = doc.AddSection();
section.AddParagraph("Hello, PDF.");

doc.SavePdf("hello.pdf");

Three things are happening here:

1. Document.Create builds the in-memory tree and sets the title and author metadata.
2. AddSection appends a section: a run of pages that share page setup, and AddParagraph adds a block of text to it.
3. SavePdf (an extension method from Rivoli.Pdf) lays the tree out and writes the bytes.

Where the file lands

SavePdf("hello.pdf") writes to a path relative to the process’s current working directory: typically your project folder when you run with dotnet run. Pass an absolute path if you want to be sure:

doc.SavePdf(Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, "hello.pdf"));

Async and streams

SavePdf has companions for the cases you’d expect:

await doc.SavePdfAsync("hello.pdf");

using var stream = File.Create("hello.pdf");
doc.SavePdf(stream, "1.7");           // target PDF 1.7

A slightly richer document

Real documents have headings, structured content, and a bit of styling. Here’s a short report with a heading, an intro paragraph, a bulleted list, and a table:

using Rivoli.Pdf;
using Rivoli.Pdf.Builders;
using Rivoli.Pdf.Model;

var doc = Document.Create("Quarterly Report", "Finance");
doc.DefaultPageSize = PageSize.A4;
doc.DefaultMargin = Margin.Standard;

var section = doc.AddSection();

section
    .H1("Quarterly Report")
    .AddParagraph("Prepared by the finance team. Figures are unaudited.");

section.AddUnorderedList(list => list
    .Item("Revenue grew 18% quarter over quarter.")
    .Item("Operating margin held steady at 22%.")
    .Item("Headcount increased by 14."));

section.AddTable(table => table
    .Header("Quarter", "Revenue", "Profit")
    .Row("Q1", "$1.2M", "$200K")
    .Row("Q2", "$1.5M", "$250K"));

doc.SavePdf("report.pdf");

The fluent helpers (H1, AddParagraph, AddUnorderedList, AddTable), each return the object they were called on, so you can chain them or call them in sequence, whichever reads better. They are thin wrappers over plain C# objects; see Working with the builder for the three construction styles and when to reach for each.

Reading existing PDFs

Rivoli PDF can also load PDFs back into a document tree with DocumentExtensions.LoadPdf("in.pdf"). Treat reading as supported with caveats; authoring is the primary path.

Heading levels at a glance

The heading helpers map to font sizes for you, so you rarely set sizes by hand:

Helper	Level	Use for
H1	1	Document or chapter title
H2	2	Major section
H3	3	Subsection
H4–H6	4–6	Finer-grained nesting

AddHeading(text) is equivalent to H1(text); AddHeading(text, level) lets you pass the level as a number when it’s computed.

Next

• Building blocks: the document tutorial, starting from the DOM and working up.
• The document model: how Document, Section, Block, and Inline fit together.
• How-to guides: task-focused recipes for common documents.