How to create PDF File in Java – iText Example

This is also one of the top 20 Java libraries I recommend Java programmer to learn. Learning these libraries will greatly improve your ability as a Java developer.

Getting iText

You can either download iText jar from its home page http://www.lowagie.com/iText/download.html

iText core: iText-5.5.13.jar

or you can also download from the Maven repository by adding iText dependency on your pom.xml file.

iText Maven Dependency

com.itextpdf

iText Gradle Dependency

compile group: 'com.itextpdf' , name: 'itextpdf' , version: '5.5.13'

How to create PDF files/documents in Java – iText library Example

Here is a complete code example to generate a PDF file using the
iText library in Java.

import java.io.File; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.IOException; import java.io.OutputStream; import java.sql.Date; import com.lowagie.text.Document; import com.lowagie.text.Paragraph; import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfWriter; * Java Program to generate PDF document using iText library. * @author Javin public class Testing < public static void main(String args[]) < OutputStream file = null ; file = new FileOutputStream( new File( "Contacts.pdf" )); // Create a new Document object Document document = new Document(); // You need PdfWriter to generate PDF document PdfWriter.getInstance(document, file); // Opening document for writing PDF document.open(); // Writing content document.add( new Paragraph( "Hello World, Creating PDF document in Java is easy" )); document.add( new Paragraph( "You are customer # 2345433" )); document.add( new Paragraph( new Date( new java.util.Date().getTime()).toString())); // Add meta data information to PDF file document.addCreationDate(); document.addAuthor( "Javarevisited" ); document.addTitle( "How to create PDF document in Java" ); document.addCreator( "Thanks to iText, writing into PDF is easy" ); // close the document document.close(); System.out.println( "Your PDF File is succesfully created" ); > catch (Exception e) < e.printStackTrace(); // closing FileOutputStream if (file != null ) < > catch (IOException io) < /*Failed to close*/ Your PDF File is successfully created

Adding metadata/Setting attributes of PDF using free Java-PDF library

While you generate a PDF, you may want to set its different attribute like: author name, title, file description etc. iText jar can help you to set different attributes of a PDF file. Document object provide different methods to add various attributes to a PDF file.

document.addCreationDate(); document.addAuthor( "" ); document.addTitle( "How to create PDF document in Java" ); document.addCreator( "Thanks to iText, writing into PDF is easy" );

That’s all on how to generate PDF files in Java using iText. Lots of open source framework uses iText to provide PDF support in their application. for example display tag, which is a popular JSP tag library to generate dynamic HTML tables, allow you to export table in PDF format. It does this conversion by using iText library, so all you need is to include iText.jar in your classpath and boom, you can export PDF documents from Java application.

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Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Javin Paul, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: How to create PDF File in Java – iText Example

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