Automating PDF Invoices in .NET from JSON Data Without MS Word

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Generating PDF documents such as invoices in .NET has traditionally relied on Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word, which tends to fail on Linux servers and Docker containers because it needs a full Office installation and a GUI. Building PDFs manually with low-level libraries is also hard to maintain, since every layout change requires code changes. The article proposes a mail-merge approach that fills a .docx template with data from a JSON file and exports the result as a PDF. It demonstrates this with the Document .NET library from SautinSoft, which requires no MS Office or Adobe dependencies. The example uses a cat-breed JSON dataset with merge fields and a C# implementation that deserializes the data and merges it into the template.

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