K.FluentPdf Designer for Visual Studio
The designer lets you build a K.FluentPdf document visually inside Visual Studio 2026, with a live
preview, and turns it into ordinary fluent C#. It is a preview: it is not published on the
Visual Studio Marketplace yet. You build and install it from this repository.
Layout: toolbox and document tree on the left, live preview in the centre, properties on the right.
What you get
| Area |
What it does |
| Toolbox |
Text, Heading, Column, Row, Table, Image, Line, Spacer, Box, Page number, Page break. Click one to add it at the selection, or drag it onto a line of the document tree. |
| Document tree |
Shows pages, header, content and footer, then elements, row items, table rows and cells, and text spans. The right-click menu has Add, Duplicate, Wrap in box, Cut/Copy/Paste, Move up/down, Delete. There are also Table commands: insert or delete rows and columns, merge right, merge down, unmerge, and add or remove a diagonal. Text has commands to add spans and page numbers. Images have commands to choose or embed a file. |
| Preview |
Every edit re-renders the real K.FluentPdf output (the same engine, fonts and pagination as GeneratePdf). Zoom runs from 50 % to 200 %. If the design has an error, a red banner explains it and the last good preview stays visible. |
| Properties |
Each element has a Box group: text style, padding, border, corner radius, background, width, height, alignment and margin. Each element type also has its own group. Thicknesses accept 4, 4, 2 or left, top, right, bottom. A text style accepts text such as Noto Sans 12pt bold #1946A0 (also italic, underline, superscript, subscript, lh=1.2). |
| Colours |
Every colour property (page and element backgrounds, borders, text, table colours) shows a swatch. Its … button opens the Windows colour picker. You can still type #RRGGBB, or #AARRGGBB for transparency. Image and font paths have a … file browser and are stored relative to the design. |
| Page background |
Right-click a page (or its header, content or footer) > Page background to set a colour, an image file or an embedded image, to turn the image into a watermark (10 % opacity, whole image), or to remove it. Generated code that uses a background image needs K.FluentPdf 0.1.0-preview.3 or later. Under Page > BackgroundImage you can set the fit (Cover fills the page and crops; Contain shows the whole image; Stretch uses the exact page size) and the opacity. |
| Undo / redo |
Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, or the toolbar buttons. Every change is undoable, including property edits and table merges. |
| Save |
Ctrl+S writes the .kfpdf file. The design is then generated as C# (see below). The file is checked out from source control before the first edit. |
| Export PDF… |
Writes a PDF of the design and opens it. |
Install and run
Requirements: Visual Studio 2026 (18.x, x64 or arm64) and the .NET 10 runtime. The preview runs in a
separate .NET 10 process. Projects that use the generated code need the K.FluentPdf NuGet package
(dotnet add package K.FluentPdf --prerelease). The extension is marked Preview in its manifest; this is
shown in the installer and in Extensions > Manage Extensions.
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