CSS support list? Future support?

Hi there,

Just started to use Gembox and was wondering if you could help out with the following:

  1. Is there a list of CSS properties supported? Currently I see a lot of shortcomings such as no flexbox support, widths on divs, border-radius, sometimes padding doesn’t work on elements
  2. Is there any plan to support CSS3+ level. I know many other libraries have support for this
  3. While I understand that word documents and such might not support everything in html, it shouldn’t prevent the pdf from generating correctly with advanced css. I read other comments where it’s suggested you use a document model that won’t be able to support this?
  4. Is table the only real way to create layouts in gembox?

Thanks for your time and effort

Hi Rob,

Unfortunately, we don’t have a list of supported CSS properties at the moment.
However, we do try to cover as much as possible and are adding new ones (even from CSS3+) based on user reports.

Nevertheless, as you already know, GemBox.Document uses DocumentModel object to represent any input file that it loads (that can be DOC, DOCX, RTF, HTML, ODT, or PDF).

This model is the closest to the Word document’s structure:
https://www.gemboxsoftware.com/document/docs/content-model.html
That is why currently if something doesn’t exist in Word documents (like “border-radius”) or cannot be represented with the same semantics (resized or repositioned block-level elements) then GemBox.Document will not accurately represent it with its model.

We are considering introducing a more accurate representation in the future, but I’m afraid this won’t be available any time soon.
For now, I would say that your best options are table layouts, centered layouts, or anything else with provided CSS for “print” media that adjusts the content to document structure.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Mario

Thank you for your prompt reply, much appreciated.

You explained why the limitations come about, I guess unless DocumentModel is changed, or you change the rendering engine for PDF then this won’t be possible

Regards,
Rob