title: ActiveReports as a convert to pdf machine
body: <p>The company I'm with is likely to obtain an ActiveReports 7 license. There's a new project requirement that several webgrids (not actually webgrids, but more like html rendered with zurb) need to be converted into pdfs. At one point in the code behind they're effectively datasets or can be created into such. Is there a way to shuttle the data from the datasets into active reports, then render it out as a PDF. I'd like to keep the report as generic as possible, and thus have one active report for all the datatables, so doing using active reports as its usually done is kind of out of the question.</p>
  
  <p>The only thing I can think of at the moment is a single textbox in the group header into which I could concatenate all the headers, and a single textbox in the details into which I could throw all the data for each row. The problem here is that I'd run into many formatting issues as nothing would line up properly - as tab delimiting would solve nothing here. I could have multiple textboxes with various spacing, but then it would eventually devolve into a different report for each dataset.  Is it possible to apply some sort of markup so that I could keep the spacing of columns as I feed the data in. Do active reports richtextboxes honor html markup? Or is there another solution altogether?</p>
  
  <p>I'd use Itextsharp, but its not free for commercial products.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,
  Sam</p>