I have data in a table of an arbitrary size that I would like to render as an image file. What is the best way to go about this in Java? I can't seem to find any libraries written explicitly for rendering tables.
Example:
I might have three columns ("Col1", "Col2", "Col3") and three rows of data. I would expect output as an image file like this (formatting doesn't need to match exactly):
Possible solutions/workarounds I've considered:
Using some sort of pdf library to assemble a table and then converting the pdf to an image. I tried itext7, but couldn't manage to render a pdf with a table as an image.
Using a Swing JTable instance in an invisible JFrame and creating an image from that. The problem with this solution is that I need this code to work in a headless Ubuntu server environment, and it just throws a HeadlessException.
Rendering a LaTeX table with some library, though a quick Google search came up empty for such libraries that can create tables.
You can technically render this data in table and generate a PDF and later export it as an image(JPEG/PNG/TIFF,BMP) using pdfRender product of iText 7.
Please refer to this page of iText https://itextpdf.com/en/products/itext-7/convert-pdf-to-image-pdfrender
Related
We are using AcroForm to update the fillable PDF. We are facing issue when trying to fill a larger text/data in the available field, Data is getting hidden due to less space (form filed size).
I currently have a pre-made PDF, which I have gone and used Adobe Acrobat PRO to create some entry fields within the PDF.Once I have completed the entire form, I would like to use Java to run through the PDF fill in the form with the associated information from some data (JSON/database), and re-save the PDF.
We are using PDFbox to fill the data, but its not working as expected. Could you please suggest some better approach where I can use acroform to fill the data using java and rows can be shifted based on data available i.e. form field size can be adjusted automatically as per data size.
Please find attached image where we are filling data as "Arvind Kumar Mishra 1234567899999 xsd test" on of the acrobat form field but only "Arvind Kumar Mishra 1234567899999" is getting displayed. Remaining data " xsd test " is not visible.
Could you please help on same. If we can do the same with open source tool, it would be great, but any suggestion would appreciable.
I have to create a pdf using itext which will contain a button, when clicked should add a row in an existing PdfPTable. I wrote some code to create a PushbuttonField. While trying to set action I can only find PdfAction.javaScript. I am not able to figure out how to add a row in a table. I tried searching online but all I could find is PdfAction.javaScript
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
When you create a PDF file, you draw text, lines and shapes to a canvas. That is also what happens when you add a PdfPTable to a Document. If you look at the syntax of the PDF page, you won't recognize a table. You'll find text (the content of the cells), lines (the borders), and shapes (the backgrounds), but you won't find a table. If the table is distributed over different pages, the "table" on one page won't know that it is related to the "table" on the other page.
Sure, you can add semantic structure to the document by introducing marked content, and by creating a structure tree, but that mechanism which we call Tagged PDF can't be used to make the PDF "editable" the same way a Word document is editable. Tagged PDF is (among others) used to allow assistive technology to present the content to the visually impaired (e.g. in the context of PDF/UA). The presence of structure doesn't change the fact that all text, all lines, and all shapes are added at absolute positions.
This is very different from HTML where the position on a page of a <table>, <tr>, <th>, or <td> is calculated at the moment the page is rendered. In HTML this position can even change when you resize the browser window.
There is no such thing in PDF (except if you use XFA (*), a technology that is deprecated since ISO 32000-2). All content on a page has a fixed position, hardcoded into the page's content stream. Changing the size of the PDF viewer window won't change anything to the position of the page content.
Because of all of this, your question is invalid. It is impossible to create a button in PDF that adds a row to a table, because:
In many cases there is no table: there is just a bunch of text, lines, and shapes at absolute positions,
Even if there is the notion of a table (using Tagged PDF): the visual represenation of that table is fixed at creation time, it can't be changed at consumption time.
You want to use an ordinary PDF viewer as if it were a PDF editor. That is impossible for all the reasons listed above.
(*) XFA was deprecated for different reasons. One of the most important reasons it is the lack of support for XFA. There aren't many viewers that support XFA. If you would post a follow-up question asking *"How can I create an XFA document?", the answer would be: "Don't do this!" Creating XFA is extremely complex, and once you've succeeded in creating an XFA form, you'll discover that many of your customers won't be able to consume the file because their viewer doesn't support the format.
I'm trying to generate an xsl to be printed in a pre-printed sheet which works fine.
Now i want to give the user a better previsualization (in the pdf screen version) adding a background image which emulates the "pre-printed" stuf on the sheet to give the user a "context" of what is he printing.
The question is: Is there any way I can set a background image in xsl (using apache fop) visible only in pdf but not in the printed version of it?
Thank you all for reading or givin any advice.
Although as the comments state, you can't have content in the PDF that does not come out in a physical printed copy, here is one possible work around for you. Depending on how your users are ultimately going to be using FOP for PDF rendering and how your a driving the work flow, it's possible to pass a parameter into an xslt file before the transofrmation phase is run, so potentially, you could do a dual rendering of the same PDF, one that is presented to the user where the background image is enabled, and one that gets printed, you could just set a variable similar to how they do in this Example, and call it something like $isPreview, and just use a simple if or choose statement to check for 'Y' or 'N'.
Since you are sending to a printer, you may even want to take advantage of FOP's ability to generate to Postscript rather than PDF, I've used this feature quite extensively for print documents using FOP while also producing a PDF copy for electronic delivery via email or hosted services, and I've yet to find any discrepancy between the PDF rendering and what is printed after sending a rendered postscript file, so it should work well for you as well.
As I said, this is not truly a solution to your problem as you've presented it, but as a work around, it could get you the desired results if your clever about how you implement it.
I don;t think the statement that it is not possible is true, I am just not sure how to create such a PDF with FOP. Certainly you can add an image field. One would use a button field and place the image in the button. Then you would set the properties of that button to not print (printable false).
PDF support images in fields: https://answers.acrobatusers.com/adding-image-field-form-q41825.aspx
RenderX supports PDF Form fields but I do not see where they support an image inside the button, only text: http://www.renderx.com/reference.html#PDF%20Forms. But they do support setting a field to "printable".
I used iTextPdf ver 5.4.2 to insert data into the PDF file. Now I have reached at problem where I need to insert one table in which there's lots of rows and I want to make it fixed height with scrollable functionality.
And added to the problem is I need to add form fields similar to HTML form fields eg: select,textbox,checkbox etc.(I also used other libraries like fliyngSaucer with html-cleaner to change html directly to pdf but it dosen't render select,input and other kind of statement neither it makes my table scrollable)
I am working on a billing program - right now when you click the appropriate button it generates a frame that shows the various charges etc, basically an invoice. Is there a way to give the user an option of saving that frame as a document, either Microsoft Word, Microsoft Works or PDF?
One approach would be to save the frame as an image, you can do that by using the following syntax to convert it to an image.
BufferedImage myImage = new BufferedImage(size.width,size.height,
BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
Graphics2D g2 = myImage.createGraphics();
myComponent.paint(g2);
you can then save this image and pass it into a jasper report. From the JasperPrint object you can then save in a few different formats, including pdf. A better but similar approach would be to pass the Graphics context into JasperReports(there is a renderer to do this in jasper, and the quality is much better).
Paint JFrame in a BufferedImage. paint() method of JFrame
Save the image as jpg or png or whatever image format
Take some pdf library and create a blank pdf (e.g. iText)
Insert the image into the PDF document
Save it - done
Instead of generating a word document, I'd rather use a Java library like iText to produce a PDF document (more portable) or, even better, the JasperReport report library that can output reports in a wide range of formats (PDF, XML, HTML, CSV, XLS, RTF, TXT) as suggested by bigbrother82 in a comment. This looks cleaner to me than using an image, especially for printing (not even mentioning that your invoice may be a multi-page document).
I'd likely look at this from a slightly different direction and instead of asking how to splat the GUI form as-is into a PDF or word document I'd ask how to get that content into a Word/PDF document.
The answer to that question is Apache FOP. Generate a XSL-FO file and ask FOP to convert it into a RTF document (with a .DOC extension) or a PDF.
Normally one does this by generating an XML file containing the data you need printed. Then use an XSLT to convert that XML to XSL-FO. I however found it easier to generate a XSL-FO file directly using a templating language (such as Freemarker).
You might want to look at the online demo for Docmosis as an example which gives the user the options for requesting the document up front. That demo does a download, but it could direct the document into a frame instead and leave it to the browser to display. This style of working (as metioned by others) is looking at the problem from a different angle and deciding up front what format, rather than after the fact and then trying to save the frame contents.