title: ASP.NET website, server-side DOCX to PDF conversion
body: <p>I've been having a heckuva time with this problem, and there seems to be a lot of noise out there in search engines in getting to the bottom of it, so forgive me if I've missed a silver bullet out there.</p>
  
  <p>The base need is that I have to generate a PDF document that has both static and dynamic elements. I started to do this by having a PDF template with all the static content, and then I wanted to inject various dynamic elements into it. The problem is that PDFs are not meant to be manipulated that way, and depending on the size of the dynamic text I put in there, might overflow text on other pages. I was using iTextSharp but can't get past this problem.</p>
  
  <p>A possible fallback is to generate a DOCX, which I've done before, and then convert it into a PDF on the backend. The only libraries I've found to do this are paid apps (like <a href="http://www.aspose.com/categories/.net-components/aspose.pdf-for-.net/default.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Aspose</a>). There are <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb412305.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">examples out there</a> that convert to PDF without these libraries, but they seem to require a client-side application. I'm doing this via IIS.</p>
  
  <p>To make a long story longer...are there free libraries that will convert a DOCX file to a PDF server-side without launching client applications to do so?</p>