Design PDF in .NET MAUI XAML with DrawnUI | Community Feed

A report, a statement, or a certificate often has to leave the app as a PDF. Nick Kovalsky shows how to define that document as a DrawnUI layout in XAML — the same bindings and controls as a screen — and render it onto paper with SkiaSharp.

What you’ll learn

Where this fits among the other options — a document API such as Gerald Versluis’s iText sample when the file is text and images, a band-based engine such as Pysar for invoices, and a drawn layout when the PDF should reuse the app’s charts, maps, and custom paint
The report as a page — a SkiaLayout column bound to a view model, no UseCache inside the report so text stays vectors, and MauiXamlInflator set to SourceGen so a long table does not inflate through reflection in a Debug build
Paper units — portrait A4 at 150 dpi via DrawnUI’s Pdf helper, margins in inches, and font sizes that print at a known point size
The export loop — create the report off any Canvas, measure at page width with unlimited height, and warm up into an SKPictureRecorder until async images and map tiles report ContentIsLoaded
Page breaks that respect rows — Pdf.SplitStackToPages splits a templated column between items, then each page is drawn into SKDocument in points (72 per inch) so the file is a real A4
Beyond MAUI — the same report in code-behind works for Blazor or a plain .NET server with DrawnUi.Net

Open the post for the RepoReport sample, which fills a multi-page report from the GitHub API, and for the Racebox production report that started the technique.