Gios WORD .NET Library (using RTF specification)

Paolo Gios

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8 Aug 2005LGPL31 min read

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A .NET library for generating Word documents (.DOC) using the RTF (Rich Text Format) specification.

Download complete project with source files - 61.1 Kb

This is the output of "Example 1", included in the library.

Introduction

The Gios WORD .NET is the second thing that a good C# developer needs to deploy in his business projects... The first one?!? You probably know it is the Gios PDF .NET library!

So, that's why I decided to develop this library: after the need for generating PDFs, you will need the same for WORDs!

Gios WORD .NET supports:

Tables with rows and columns span.
Images
Header and Footer
Line indent - paragraph
Custom Control Words (See the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification for this implementation.)
Output to a generic System.IO.Stream object.

Background

Building a library for exporting documents in the Rich Text Format is quite easier than for PDFs. In fact, the Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification, version 1.8 shows how simple it is to generate a word document with all the well known features. I used the version 1.5 (which is fully compatible with WORD 97).

Using the code

The library is very simple to be used! The first thing you need to do is instantiating a new WordDocument:

WordDocument myWordDocument=
    new WordDocument(WordDocumentFormat.Letter_8_5x11);

and with the WordDocument object you can start with the description of the document. It's like an automation. For example, if you want to set the font, you can write:

myWordDocument.SetFont(new Font("Comic Sans MS",
                                60,FontStyle.Bold));
myWordDocument.SetForegroundColor(Color.Red);
myWordDocument.SetFontBackgroundColor(Color.Yellow);

And now we set some alignment:

myWordDocument.SetTextAlign(WordTextAlign.Center);

To write a text... You can imagine:

myWordDocument.Write("Hello World!");

And, in the end, you output the document!

myWordDocument.SaveToFile("HelloWorld.doc");

And this is the result:

Remember, you can also output the WORD Document to a generic stream. These are the lines for a web response:

Response.ClearHeaders();
Response.AppendHeader("Content-disposition",
   "attachment;filename=HelloWorld.doc");
Response.ContentType="application/msword"; 
myPdfDocument.SaveToStream(Response.OutputStream);
Response.End();

To continue with the training, please download the library and follow the examples!

History

August 8^th, 2005 - First release.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3)

Written By

Paolo Gios

Web Developer

Italy

Freelance software ASPNET / C# Software Developer

I live in Torino, Italy

my homepage is: http://www.paologios.com

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