title: Word/PDF Generation in C# with hundreds of pages is too slow
body: <p>I'm having speed issue generating documentation in C#.  </p>
  
  <p>I am basically trying to create documents with 600+ pages.  But the tools I have used handle this very slowly.  </p>
  
  <p>I first tried using <a href="http://docx.codeplex.com/" rel="nofollow">DocX</a> by Novacode.  Creation of this document with 600+ pages takes upwards to 3 minutes.  I learned that there could be an issue with the function "InsertDocument" so I tried to find a different solution.</p>
  
  <p>I started looking into opening a HTML document into word.  While this is a fast solution, images are not embedded into the document. The HTML syntax (src="data:image/png;base64,xxxx") is not supported in MS Word.</p>
  
  <p>I could use URLs to the images, but then if the internet connection is down, the images would not display.</p>
  
  <p>I then started looking into a HTML->PDF solution. <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/itextsharp/" rel="nofollow">iTextSharp</a> is a little faster than the DocX solution, but still takes 1-2 minutes to generate this document.</p>
  
  <p>I am simply out of ideas.  I'm not sure a commercial product would be better, and I don't want to shell out that kind of cash, to just have the same speed issue.</p>
  
  <p>Has anyone had experience with creating Word/PDF documents with 600+ pages in C# that is fairly quick (1-5 seconds).</p>