How to create Table using Apache PDFBox

Question

We are planning to migrate our pdf generation utilities from iText to PDFBox (Due to licensing issues in iText). With some effort, I was able to write and position text, draw lines etc. But creating Tables with text embedded in Table cells is a challenge, I went through the documentation, examples, Google, Stackoverflow couldn't find a thing. Was wondering if PDFBox provides native support for creating Tables with embedded text. My last resort would be to use this link https://github.com/eduardohl/Paginated-PDFBox-Table-Sample

Answer 1

Since I also needed table drawing functionality for a side project, I implemented a small "table drawer" library myself, which I uploaded to github.

In order to produce such a table – for instance – ...

... you would need this code. In the same file you find the code for that table as well:

The current "feature list" includes:

• set font and font size on table level as well as on cell level
• define single cells with bottom-, top-, left- and right-border width separately
• define the background color on row or cell level
• define padding (top, bottom, left, right) on cell level
• define border color (on table, row or cell level)
• specify text alignment (vertical and horizontal)
• cell spanning and row spanning
• text wrapping and line spacing

Also it should not be too hard to add missing stuff like having different border colors for borders on top, bottom, left and right-borders, if needed.

Answer 2

Thanks to the links provided by Tilman. Using the boxable API (https://github.com/dhorions/boxable) I was able to create the table I wanted to. Just an FYI I wanted to create the table with variable number of cells. For example row 1 would have 2 cells, row 2 could have 5 cells and row 3 could have just 3 cells. I was able to do with ease. I followed Example1.java in the link mentioned above.

Answer 3

This example code works for me. I think this would be helpful to you

public static void creteTablePdf() throws IOException {
    PDDocument document = new PDDocument();
    PDPage page = new PDPage();
    document.addPage(page);

    int pageWidth = (int)page.getTrimBox().getWidth(); //get width of the page
    int pageHeight = (int)page.getTrimBox().getHeight(); //get height of the page

    PDPageContentStream contentStream = new PDPageContentStream(document,page);
    contentStream.setStrokingColor(Color.DARK_GRAY);
    contentStream.setLineWidth(1);

    int initX = 50;
    int initY = pageHeight-50;
    int cellHeight = 20;
    int cellWidth = 100;

    int colCount = 3;
    int rowCount = 3;

    for(int i = 1; i<=rowCount;i++){
        for(int j = 1; j<=colCount;j++){
            if(j == 2){
                contentStream.addRect(initX,initY,cellWidth+30,-cellHeight);

                contentStream.beginText();
                contentStream.newLineAtOffset(initX+30,initY-cellHeight+10);
                contentStream.setFont(PDType1Font.TIMES_ROMAN,10);
                contentStream.showText("Dinuka");
                contentStream.endText();

                initX+=cellWidth+30;
            }else{
                contentStream.addRect(initX,initY,cellWidth,-cellHeight);

                contentStream.beginText();
                contentStream.newLineAtOffset(initX+10,initY-cellHeight+10);
                contentStream.setFont(PDType1Font.TIMES_ROMAN,10);
                contentStream.showText("Dinuka");
                contentStream.endText();

                initX+=cellWidth;
            }
        }
        initX = 50;
        initY -=cellHeight;
    }

    contentStream.stroke();
    contentStream.close();


    document.save("C:\\table.pdf");
    document.close();
    System.out.println("table pdf created");
}