Aspose.Total

What do you like best?

We most appreciate Aspose.Total's speed and accuracy, plus its wide range of supported file formats.

What do you dislike?

Price is only negative factor we've found, so far.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our company came across the Aspose product line during the development of a new web-based application with a feature set that requires extensive document handling capabilities, such as conversion (from many formats to PDF), manipulation (split, join, rotate, etc), and editing (adding annotations or labels). We were pleased to receive an extension to the trial license period that allowed our developers to fully investigate the features of the Aspose.Total library, and that extra time allowed us to uncover two additional use-cases for the software. This increased the value-added for Aspose and reinforced our decision to purchase.

Our new web-based application takes in a variety of "source documents" from the user and converts them to PDF as the standard file type for "working documents" within the platform. Once in PDF format, the web-based application manipulates the working PDF documents by splitting, combining, or annotating the files before providing the user an option to export the file set along with a report. Our requirements include being able to import Word documents, PowerPoint slides, Excel Workbooks, image files in a number of common formats, text files, and both searchable and non-searchable PDF files.

During the development phase of our web-based application, we evaluated a number of software products and code libraries to perform the required file conversion and manipulation functions. The evaluation process included a number of open-source, licensed, and subscription-based software tools. Aspose.Total for .Net was the hands-down best solution available at the time. It was especially well suited for our development environment, specifically Microsoft Azure. Not only could the Aspose library convert multiple document types to PDF quickly and accurately, it could also manipulate PDFs in all the ways that we needed. Being a dynamically loaded library that did not require installation of specific software locally allowed us to code using the Azure App Service.

Two additional use-cases for Aspose evolved as our developers started using the Aspose.Total for .Net libraries: generating reports and emails. By creating Word documents to serve as the base templates, our software could use Aspose to modify the report templates before converting them to finished PDF reports - thereby creating a very professional and well-structure report programmatically. These reports could contain all the custom headers, logos, and footers our clients wanted to see in a customized deliverable. Similarly, we could create HTML emails to serve as templates and use Aspose to modify the templates before sending well-designed emails to customers.

Although difficult to capture a library's usefulness in an image, a picture is still worth a thousand words. Here's two from our application:

https://www.compendia.digital/images/WordDocConvertedToPDFandBatesStamped.png

https://www.compendia.digital/images/PowerPointConvertedToPDFandBatesStamped.png