>It's not the difficulty per se. There is ongoing maintenance and testing that need to be added into the picture.

True. The project where we rolled out own had simple requirements but PDF's were created on the fly on a web server so workload was a factor - with a specifically targeted library we could do it more efficiently that using ITextSharp.

>There is a third option. There are several PDF libraries on CodePlex.

Haven't looked recently. At the time SharpPDF seemed to be to only real competitor to IText......

>>I assumed that by 'external' Michel was referring to third party DLLs - in this case specifically ITextSharp.
>>Writing a full-blown PDF generator would indeed be time consuming but if the requirements are fairly basic it's not too difficult.