Using Winnovative PDF Chromium in Azure Functions on Windows

Winnovative PDF Chromium for .NET is a library that can be easily integrated into Azure Function applications, enabling the conversion of web pages and HTML strings to PDF documents or images.

The HTML to PDF converter component of the library uses a rendering engine based on Chromium, capable of processing modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript content in compliance with the latest web standards.

Winnovative PDF Chromium for .NET runs in Azure Functions 64-bit applications without requiring any installation or prior configuration of the deployment environment. The steps necessary to use the library in your own applications deployed on Azure Functions are detailed below.

The library targets .NET Standard 2.0 and is compatible with any .NET Core or .NET Framework application that supports this standard.

Create a new .NET project in Visual Studio and use the NuGet Package Manager to add a reference to the Winnovative.Pdf.Chromium.Windows package.

After installing the package, add the using Winnovative.Pdf.Chromium; directive at the top of your source files to access the Winnovative PDF Chromium API.

Example code snippets and usage details are available in the Getting Started on Windows documentation section.

Uncheck the Run from package file option when you create the publish profile in Visual Studio.

Select the App service plan or Premium for Plan Type option in publish profile creation wizard. The Consumption plan is not suitable for running the converter.

HTML to PDF conversion can be resource-intensive and may require significant CPU and memory depending on the complexity of the HTML content being processed.

The B1 plan (1 core, 1.75 GB RAM) is the minimum supported hosting option and may be used for basic or low-volume scenarios. For development and testing, we recommend at least a B2 plan (2 cores, 3.5 GB RAM).

For production environments, especially when processing complex or large documents, a Premium plan such as P1v3 (2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM) or higher is strongly recommended. Premium plans provide the performance and reliability required for consistent PDF generation under load.

The Free and Shared plans are not suitable for running the converter.

After the profile was created, before starting the publishing, select Portable as Target Runtime.

Publish the Azure Function application for Windows.

At this point, everything should be configured and you can run your Azure Functions application on Windows.

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