PdfSharp vs PdfSharpCore

[SoftCircuits]

Is anyone familiar with the actual difference between PdfSharp and PdfSharpCore?

I ask because I'm looking into using MigraDoc, which uses PdfSharp. Are there any disadvantages using PdfSharp with ASP.NET Core?

[Tarek-Hasan]

• PdfSharpCore replaced GDI+, substituting Image support with SixLabors.ImageSharp and Fonts support with SixLabors.Fonts.
• Only basic text layout is supported by PdfSharpCore, so RTL and CJK languages aren't fully supported. PDFsharp supports text Matrix transformations.
• PdfSharpCore supports .Net 8 where PDFsharp supports .Net 10 LTS.
• PdfSharpCore supports PDF v1.7 and PDFsharp supports up to v2.0.

[TH-Soft]

PdfSharpCore started as a port of a port of PDFsharp 1.32. PDFsharp 1.32 depended on GDI+.

PDFsharp 6.2.4 has evolved a lot since then. Now there are three versions, one depending on GDI+, one depending on WPF, one that does not depend on Windows and runs on any OS supported by .NET.

Disadvantages? PDFsharp Core 6.2.4 supports JPG, BMP, and PNG images. GIF and TIFF are not yet supported.
Advantage: No external dependencies for image handling.

With GDI+ or WPF, you're bound to Windows, but all image formats supported by Windows can be used with PDFsharp - including GIF and TIFF.

Many details have changed. PDFsharp 1.32 was published in 2012, that is 14 years ago.