Develop Reference

Generate PDF or Similar to it

I'm creating a JAVA application
and I want to create and display and print a PDF file.
Like this example:
http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/331702Sanstitre.jpg
So can you give the right way to do it ?
I mean is this a pdf file displayed into a JPanel or something else ?
and thnx alot.

For working with PDF files I would recommend using a library such as Apache PDFBox which has the ability to write, read, and print PDF files using org.apache.pdfbox.PrintPDF
The API can be found Here
As for displaying it in the JFrame, you can simply read the text and print it out in a Swing Text Area

For generation of pdf files you can use Jasper Reports library. It is popular API for creation pdf files from template in which specific data is inserted. Template files have ".jrxml" extension and can be created and edited by Jaspersoft Studio. These files look like forms with variable fields, this is very useful for generating different kinds of reports.
The API for Jasper Reports Library can be found here.

Using templates for creating PDF files

I have some PDF template (with header and footer). I want to generate documents that are based on that template.
Is there any way to do that with iText? Thank you
P.S. Right now I am generate a document on-fly i.e. every time I generate header, footer and the context itself.
UPDATE: I have found incredible library called PD4ML. It's not free, but not such expensive, BUT it has really cool features such as HTML2PDF conversion on fly, supports a lot of HTML-CSS tags and has even its own jsp tags library! So I really suggest it when you need something instead of heavy and memory-eating JasperReports.

You can use JasperReports library and the iReport visual designer.
JasperReports use iText to produce PDFs from "jasper" templates, that are XML files (following the jrxml DTD) compiled in java classes, but allows you to use the template for generating MS Office files (with POI), html, etc.

Im not sure with iText, but you can use BIRT for this purpose. http://www.eclipse.org/birt/ Its too much using it just for PDF creation, you can do a lot (more than you can imagine) with it.

If you can choose your template format. I would go with JODReport and JODConverter.
JODReport use an ODT template and fill the mapping in the template with your java code.
JODConverter use LibreOffice to convert such template in PDF or whatever fortmat LibreOffice can handle to export.
You have to be able to use LibreOffice as a service installed remotely on a machine.
I used it back in 2012 but not sure if the project is still active

Generate PDF reports through Java(web applications) using iText/ any other library using ready made data

Before you down vote me, I'm not here to ask on how to use iText in Java. My query is about generate pdf's(reports) using iText. We currently have a set of reports that are prepared in html, is there any way that I could use the data being prepared here to directly generate a pdf rather than write Java code to manually write (Java)code to prepare a table line by line as in the case of iText. A link to an existing solution would suffice as well.

try JasperReport. with this you can create templates and generate PDFs dynamically by passing just data. you can use iReport for designing jasper templates.

Another alternative to iText would be XSL-FO. You could create a Velocity template for the XSL-FO stylesheet and dynamically populate it with your data.

Generation of pdf file using java

I am developing a standalone application in Java. I want to generate a pdf file using Java code. I have a display form in which all the details are fetched from database and displayed in the window. Details are Customer Name, Order Details etc.
Now I want to have a button there which says Convert to pdf.
I want to convert this to pdf file with proper alignment and formatting like tables, font etc.
What can be an ideal way to go about it?

I'd suggest you to use reporting tool like a jasperreports.
JasperReports is entirely written in
Java and it is able to use data coming
from any kind of data source and
produce pixel-perfect documents that
can be viewed, printed or exported in
a variety of document formats
including HTML, PDF, Excel, OpenOffice
and Word.
Have a look at other open source projects (pdf api):
Apache PDFBox
Apache Tika (Toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using POI and PDFBOX parser libs.)
PDFjet

Use iText:
http://itextpdf.com/

Converting .xls to .pdf using Java(or not)

Is there a way to convert a xls file into a pdf?
I want to make a dynamical report directly to pdf file, but didn't find a way to make dynamic columns on iReport, so I've made a method on Java that exports to xls dynamically.
So I was wondering if is there a way to convert this file to pdf, but it need to be on a method from my code. Or if you have a better idea, it can be used too.
Maybe there's a way to make this pdf file from my code as I did with xls. Please help me out.
Thanks.

Try using iText http://itextpdf.com/ - I've used it to create PDFs with columnar structure.

In addition to using iText directly, there are a couple report engines that sit on top of it:
Eclipse BIRT (using 2.1.7, the last MPL/LGPL version)
Jasper Reports (which uses a Very Old version, 1.3.1 IIRC)

This is a commercial solution:
http://www.dancrintea.ro/xls-to-pdf/
If you want open source try jakarta POI.

Try using the Muhimbi PDF Converter Services. It comes with a Java compatible Web Services based interface and sample code. It does other things as well.
I worked on this application, so the usual disclaimer applies.