Using Winnovative PDF Next for .NET in Azure Functions on Windows

Winnovative PDF Next for .NET is a library that can be integrated into Azure Functions for Windows to create and process PDF documents.

You can create PDF documents, convert HTML, Word, Excel, RTF and Markdown documents to PDF, extract text and images from existing PDF documents, perform text search operations on PDF documents and convert PDF pages to images.

Winnovative PDF Next 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.Next.Windows NuGet metapackage which will install all the library components.

To install only specific components of the Winnovative PDF Next library you can add references to the corresponding NuGet packages. You can find more details about the available packages in the Getting Started on Windows documentation section.

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

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

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

For Operating System option select Windows.

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.

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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