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
Related
I have hundreds of rich PDFs that need to be generated from my application, they have images and colorful content. I was looking to build a framework which support a template and data model and can take care of rest, so adding anew pdfs would be just adding a new template. In the past i have used free-marker to generate HTML and that print HTML to PDFs, are there any better recent solution to solve this problem?
There are various things you could do:
generate xml data, apply xslt transformation to style it, and convert
the html document to a pdf
code a small class that converts whatever data format you have to a pdf document (you would need to do all the layout through code)
create a template (using whatever design program you want) pdf document, insert form fields, and have iText fill the form (several of our customers go for this approach)
Keep in mind that JasperReports uses a proprietary format. Whereas the approaches I suggested use only open and well-established formats.
Take a look at JasperReports.
[Background Info]
We had a solution in place to use Word automation serverside to convert HTM documents into Docx, PDF or Print documents. This solution broke in the latest version of Windows Server 2012. We learned that MS does not intend on Word working in this manner and after trouble shooting with MS support Engineers we have come to the conclusion that it will never work.
[Currently]
I am currently researching potential technologies and tools that my company can use to regain this functionality. We need to be able to create Docx, PDF and print files to a local printer.
I have looked into a number of tool already and I am currently leaning towards Apache FOP this seems to handle PDF and Printing for us.
However, I'm looking for some advice and suggested tools that we could use to implement a pure Java approach. Currently our application creates HTM files with all the required information. So ideally we would like to take these HTM files and "Convert" them into Docx/XLS-FO format.
[Question]
So my question that I'm hoping you will be able to help me with.
What is the best tools that I can use to get from
HTM to Docx
HTM to PDF
Or what would be the best process for achieving this? has anyone had success finding a solution for this in the past?
Thank You
It depends on the level of control and the complexity of the source HTML. There are HTML to FO stylesheets but you might find them wanting for your specific need.
So you could use the Jericho parser to read the HTML and generate FO. Or you generate the target format directly using Apache PDFBox and Apache POI
It all boils down to the level of control you want/need
docx4j-ImportXHTML will get you from XHTML to docx. From there, you can use docx4j (or some other solution eg LibreOffice/OpenOffice) to do docx to PDF.
docx4j supports docx to XSL FO, and by default uses FOP.
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.
I've written some Java code using the iText library to generate a PDF report, but specifying the layout seems very manual and takes a lot of time, re-running the code to test small adjustments.
Does anyone know of a report designer for PDFs which would work with Java? It doesn't have to be iText based, that's just what I'm using at the moment.
Yes, JasperReports. It has the iReport visual designer. Also, the API is pretty straightforward.
As far as I know, BIRT is an alternative to JasperReports.
Have in mind that both are complex reporting solutions that support exporting to a number of different formats.
You could look at Docmosis which uses Word or OpenOffice documents to provide the layout and formatting (that is, a template). It has a property you can set that will "watch" templates for changes and automatically process the changes in the background, so you can keep changing a template, then render it again without any code/compile changes.
I was looking at using iText to create both a pdf and html version of a document with RTF as a possible option. According to this question this is no longer possible with iText. Is there a library that will allow me to create a document in Java and output it as both PDF and HTML? The ability to output RTF would be nice but is not required.
As that answer to the other question states, you can just use the iText RTF Library.
I have used PD4ML to convert HTML to pdf. Even though it is a commercial app. It is very reliable and supports CSS well.
JasperReports. If you look at this package it supports export to:
pdf
html
rtf
xls
xml
You have two options to create the documents:
via iReport - a visual designer for reports
via an API, where you construct everything with Java code.
Note that even though JasperReports's main function is to create reports, it can very well create other documents, with no tabular data for example.
You could also try Docmosis since that supports the output formats provided by OpenOffice (including the ones you specified) and you can often do the job with a lot less code.