Develop Reference

Add form fields to a rotated page in pdfBox

I have a requirement to add adobe form fields to an existing pdf.
The problem I encounter is when adding fields to a rotated page, the resulting form field text orientation is incorrect.
e.g. A page that is rotated 90 degrees clockwise, results in form field where the text is "vertical".
Is there a workaround to get form fields created with the correct orientation?

The appearance characteristics dictionary (/MK entry) of the widget has an /R entry where the rotation can be set. See e.g. this file.
PDAppearanceCharacteristicsDictionary fieldAppearance
= new PDAppearanceCharacteristicsDictionary(new COSDictionary());
fieldAppearance.setRotation(90);
widget.setAppearanceCharacteristics(fieldAppearance);
You may have to adjust your coordinates. To find the best coordinates, use PDFDebugger and hover at the place you want your field to be.
Update:
For checkmarks (and radio buttons) where the appearance stream is created by the user and not by PDFBox (as seen here or in the PDFBox example) you need to set the matrix yourself like this (for 90°):
yesAP.setMatrix(AffineTransform.getQuadrantRotateInstance(1, rect.getWidth(), 0));
The "1" here is for 90°. The translation needs to be adjusted for the other rotations.

Get the Extreme right , left,top,bottom position of an image - Itext

I am setting a margin for a pdf and checking if the contents of the page are exceeding the margin.
I am easily able to do that if the contents of a page are just text.
Here s what I am doing:
I am using TextMarginFinder. I will set the left margin values of the pdf based on the book size. and check with the finder.getLlx(); since finder.getLlx(); will get me the left most position of a text in that page.
TextMarginFinder finder;
if(leftmar>=finder.getLlx())
{
errormargin=1; //left margin error
System.out.println("Page: "+i+"Margin Error:LeftMArginError ");
}
But this does not work in case if the page contains an image. Although the image goes outside of the margin, I am not getting the error with the above code since the finder.getLlx(); function seems to work only for texts.
Two Questions:
1) While looping through the pages in pdf, if there is an image in that page, how can I check if that particular page contains an image?
2) If it contains an image, how can I obtain its extreme positions?
Update after mkl suggestion
if(leftmar>=finder.getLlx())
{
errormargin=1; //left margin error
System.out.println("finder.getLlx() value ="+finder.getLlx()+", leftmar Value="+leftmar);
}
if(rightmar<= finder.getUrx()){
errormargin=1; //right margin error
System.out.println("finder.getUrx() value ="+finder.getUrx()+", rightmar Value="+rightmar);
}
if(margintop >= finder.getUry()){
errormargin=3; //top margin error
System.out.println("finder.getUry() value ="+finder.getUry()+", margintop Value="+margintop);
}
if(marginbottom >= finder.getLly()){
errormargin=3; //bottom margin error
System.out.println("finder.getLly() value ="+finder.getLly()+", marginbottom Value="+marginbottom);
}

This is more an answer to what the OP actually wanted, a way to retrieve the bounding box of all content on a page.
The OP already uses the iText TextMarginFinder render listener class to determine the bounding box of the text on page. In the context of this answer an analogous class MarginFinder has been developed which does not only consider text but also other kind of content, e.g. bitmap images and vector graphics.
Thus, replacing the use of TextMarginFinder by MarginFinder allows to find the bounding box of any content on the page.
Please be aware:
Any content is considered, the margin finder does not check whether the content makes a difference. E.g. think about white text, white bitmap areas, or white rectangles, all are considered content and, therefore, the bounding box encompasses such invisible content, too. Especially the latter example, white rectangles, might be a problem here or there as some software first paints a white rectangle over the whole page area.
Clipping paths are not considered. Thus, even content that never is drawn (because it is clipped away) makes the bounding box expand.
Page borders are not considered, either. Thus, off-page content like printer marks may make the bounding box expand even more.
The code calculating the bounding box for vector graphics is not correct: it simply returns the bounding box of all control points which in case of Bezier curves may be false. Its ignoring line widths and wedge types also results in somewhat-off coordinates.
Annotations are not considered. Thus, the resulting bounding box may be to small if annotations are expected to also be considered, e.g. for forms.
In spite of these shortcomings, the render listener usually returns correct results. If this is not enough, the class can be extended accordingly.
PS: Anyone who is interested in the original question may find answers in the MarginFinder render listener class and its use.

Add text and an alligned image to a ColumnText Itext

I am writing text from right to left.
how can i add an image at the end of the text (alligned nicely)?

The question isn't entirely clear.
The order of objects added to a Document is always respected, except in the case of Image objects. If an Image object doesn't fit the page, it can be forwarded to the next page, and other content can be added first. If you want to avoid this, use writer.setStrictImageSequence(true);
However: you're writing from Right to Left (probably in Hebrew), so the above doesn't apply, not the previous answer by Anshu. You can only use RTL in ColumnText and PdfPTable.
It's not clear what you want to do.
Do you want to add an Image at the bottom of the text? That's easy: just add the text first, then add the Image. Do you want to add an Image inline? In that case, you can wrap the Image in a Chunk as is done in this example: http://itextpdf.com/examples/iia.php?id=54
My interpretation is: you want to add the image at the bottom left, and you want the text to be added next to the image. That's more difficult to achieve. You'd need to add the Image and the text separately. Add the Image at an absolute position and add the text using 'irregular columns'. That is: ColumnText in text mode (as opposed to composite mode). For an example showing how to use irregular columns, see http://itextpdf.com/examples/iia.php?id=67

Building and printing complex table layouts with Java

A customer requested me a software, and one of its requirements is build a form and fill it with data collected from database.
This form is currently being created in Excel. It uses cells to build the form, some cells have blank background, others blank background with black bottom border (to look like a line where text is typed), others have gray background with white text, and there's also a logo image. In Excel, some cells are merged to become bigger than other cells. They fill the text in another spreadsheet and the required cells in the form take that text and format it.
I've looked many report frameworks in Java, some are very complex and some look like Excel's graph builders, but I saw none that can make a complex 2D form like this.
Data filled in it is simple, like name, quantity, some numbers, but they have different length requiring for example that name's cell to be merged to cover a full horizontal line, and some have smaller font size. There's no repeated data that would require sorting and I have no problem gathering the data.
In the end, the filled form must also be printed, so I can't use normal Swing table or grid. It will be used in Windows now, but it'd be nice to support Linux printing too.
Any suggestion of a Java component that builds a 2D layout like this and fills it with strings will be very much appreciated. I even thought of taking a screenshot of their current form and just use 2D Graphics to print the text, but I'd not be able to print it.
This is an example of the kind of form I must build, it's somewhat like that but some areas have gray background with white text:
No, it's not a duplicate, but it is a good example of the layout.

iText PDF colors are inconsistent in Acrobat

I'm generating a multipage PDF from Java using iText. Problem: the lines on my charts shift color between certain pages.
Here's a screenshot of the transition between pages:
This was taken from Adobe Reader. The lines are the correct color in OS X Preview.app.
In Reader the top is #73C352, the bottom is #35FF69. In Preview.app the line is #00FE7E.
Any thoughts on what could be causing this discrepancy? I saved the PDF from Preview.app and opened it in Adobe Reader, still has the colors off.
Here is the PDF that is having trouble. Open it in Adobe Reader and look at the transition between pages 11 & 12.
On checking this out further, it appears that the java.awt.print.PrinterJob is calling print() for each pageIndex twice. This might be a clue.

The problem with the pages with darker colors is that they include a pattern object with a transparent image. When transparency is involved, Adobe Acrobat switches automatically to a custom CMYK profile and this causes the darker colors. Only Acrobat does this, other viewers behave just fine. The solution is either to remove the pattern object with the transparent image (it seems to be a drawing artifact of the PDF generator engine, it is not used anywhere on the page) or you can make the page part of a transparency group and specify the transparency group to use RGB colorspace.

Several different possibilities, yes.
Different color matching. If you're using a "calibrated" color space on one page and a "device" color space on another, the same RGB/CMYK values can produce visually different values.
If the graph is inside a Form XObject, the same graph can appear differently depending on the current graphic state when the form is drawn.
If you could post a link to your PDF, I could probably give you a specific answer.
Ouch. That PDF is painful to shclep through. I'd like to have some words with whoever wrote their PDF converter. Harsh ones. Lots of unnecessary clipping ("text" is being clipped hither and yon, page 7 for example), poor use of patters for images, but not using patters when it would actually help, drawing text as paths, and on and on...
EDIT: Which is precisely the sort of stuff you see when rendering Java UI via a PdfGraphics2D object. You CAN keep the text as text though. It's just a matter of how you create the PdfGraphics2D instance.
Okay, so the color of the line itself is identical. 0 1 0.4 RG. HOWEVER, there is some "transparency stuff" going on.
On pages that have images with soft masks or extended graphic states that change the transparency, the green line appears darker. On pages without, it appears brighter.
I suspect that all those other PDF viewers that draw the lines consistently don't support transparency at all, or only poorly.