SelectPdf v26.2 Released with New Chromium (CEF) Rendering Engine and Full Azure Web Apps Support

We are pleased to announce the release of SelectPdf v26.2, the next step forward for the SelectPdf HTML to PDF library. This release introduces a brand-new Chromium (CEF) rendering engine built on top of CEF 146, brings full support for Azure Web Apps and other restricted hosting environments, and ships dedicated Chromium NuGet packages for every supported .NET target — from .NET Framework 2.0 all the way to .NET 10.

A New Chromium (CEF) Rendering Engine

The biggest news in v26.2 is the addition of a new rendering engine — RenderingEngine.Chromium — backed by the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) 146.

The new engine offers:

An up-to-date Chromium 146 rendering core with modern HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript support
Strong stability and predictable resource usage across high-volume conversion workloads
Clean handling of authenticated and stateful pages
Accurate internal links, bookmarks, and web element-to-PDF coordinate mapping
Hidden web elements, click triggers, lazy images, custom window-status waits, and offline-mode rendering — all available out of the box

The Chromium engine is available on every supported .NET target — net20, net40, net461, net472, netstandard2.0 — and on both AnyCPU and x64. It is shipped through dedicated NuGet packages so you only pull in the Chromium runtime when you actually need it.

Full Support for Azure Web Apps

The new Chromium engine runs cleanly on Azure App Service / Azure Web Apps, including the standard sandboxed Windows hosting tiers that historically rejected fully-featured browser engines. If you have been holding back on moving your HTML-to-PDF workloads to Azure Web Apps because of engine limitations, v26.2 removes that blocker — the same code that powers your on-premises conversions now runs unchanged in Azure.

This makes SelectPdf an excellent fit for:

ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core apps deployed to Azure Web Apps
Azure Functions and other serverless .NET workloads
Containerized deployments on Azure (App Service for Containers, Container Apps, AKS)
Cloud-first microservice architectures where running native browser binaries on the app host has been a long-standing pain point

Designed for Modern Application Architectures

SelectPdf continues to target the full breadth of modern .NET deployment scenarios:

ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core applications
Microservices and REST APIs
Cloud workloads on Azure and AWS
Docker containers and CI/CD pipelines
Enterprise backend services and desktop apps

And the full range of input sources is supported:

URLs (with authentication, proxy, and custom headers)
Raw HTML strings (with optional base URL)
Razor / cshtml output and any dynamically generated markup
Local HTML files and resources

Bug Fixes and Improvements

v26.2 also bundles a number of targeted fixes that came out of customer reports and our own regression suite:

Internal links now survive correctly in the Community edition
Background generation fixed for both the Blink and Chromium engines
Concurrency hardening across the conversion pipeline
More resilient result handling for the Chromium engine when the PDF is generated correctly
Bookmark sorting and link-destination accuracy improvements for the Chromium engine

Quick Start

Switching to the new Chromium engine is a one-line change:

// initialize converter
HtmlToPdf converter = new HtmlToPdf();

// use the new Chromium (CEF 146) rendering engine
converter.Options.RenderingEngine = RenderingEngine.Chromium;

// convert from HTML to PDF
PdfDocument doc = converter.ConvertUrl("https://example.com");

// save the PDF and clean up
doc.Save("output.pdf");
doc.Close();

// initialize converter

HtmlToPdf converter = new HtmlToPdf();

// use the new Chromium (CEF 146) rendering engine

converter.Options.RenderingEngine = RenderingEngine.Chromium;

// convert from HTML to PDF

PdfDocument doc = converter.ConvertUrl("https://example.com");

// save the PDF and clean up

doc.Save("output.pdf");

doc.Close();

To use the Chromium engine, install the matching runtime package alongside the main library:

Select.Pdf.NetCore.Chromium.Windows (or .x64) for the commercial edition
Select.HtmlToPdf.NetCore.Chromium.Windows for the free Community edition

.NET Compatibility

SelectPdf v26.2 supports the full modern .NET range:

.NET Framework 2.0, 4.0, 4.6.1, 4.7.2
.NET Standard 2.0
.NET Core 2.x and later
.NET 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and .NET 10

Both Commercial and Community editions ship across the same target matrix.

Availability

SelectPdf v26.2 is available now on NuGet and from the SelectPdf website:

Commercial edition — Select.Pdf.NetCore (or Select.Pdf.NetCore.x64), with the new Select.Pdf.NetCore.Chromium.Windows engine package — or grab the installer from the downloads page.
Community (free) edition — Select.HtmlToPdf.NetCore, with Select.HtmlToPdf.NetCore.Chromium.Windows — also available on the free downloads page.
SelectPdf.Extras add-on — updated to v26.2 (Select.Pdf.Extras / Select.Pdf.Extras.x64).

Learn more on the product pages for the PDF Library for .NET and the Community Edition, browse the online documentation, or try the C# and VB.NET live demos. For licensing questions, see the pricing page or get in touch. As always, we welcome your feedback and bug reports.