We've been using Aspose.PDF for the last 10 years or so in our C# platform, and paying for the license. It's expensive and buggy and has shite support, so a year or so back I decided to see if there was some other library or combination of libraries that could meet our needs. Basically, we needed:

* HTML to PDF

* Compress PDF

* Manual PDF generation

* Text extraction

* No browser engine or other weird dependencies

I researched every library I could find, and downloaded, integrated and tested anything that looked remotely promising.

At the end of all that, I reluctantly handed my company credit card back to Aspose. There simply wasn't any open-source or even just cheaper PDF library that I could actually make work, and all the other paid ones that did work were even more expensive.

I am in the same boat. Aspose has been the go to for Word and PDF documents. Will say, Adobe's PDF Services API offers a ton of interesting features but comes with a price tag and in my scenario, it's not HIPAA compliant.

Aspose is the library I’ve used commercially in the past, too. My experience was similar. The company I worked for at the time eventually charged more for PDF export as a paid add on. The software is very sticky so the people who truly needed pdf export directly paid, the rest relied on export to word then “printed” the pdf themselves.

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