Create a bullet list item using PDFBox

Question

I am using PDFBox 2.0 to do a HTML to PDF conversion. This is going quite well, except that I am stuck at converting the list item tag to a bullet (black, round, disc).

The official Unicode bullet character is U+2022, however none of the fonts in PDFBox support characters above the 8-bit range. I have tried embedding and using some of the fonts in the Windows font folder "C:\Windows\Fonts", but they do not seem to support more than 8-bit either.

PDFBox has a class called PDListAttributeObject which seems to have something to do with lists and bullets, but I cannot find any examples of how to use it.

So, my questions are:

Can I use PDListAttributeObject in PDFBox to write a bullet character to the contentstream? and if so, how?
Are there any standard Windows fonts that can render a bullet character?
Any other suggestions on how to get a bullet character written to a PDF?

Doesn't work with 1.8, you'll need 2.0, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25525213/how-to-write-unicode-text-to-pdf-with-pdfbox — Tilman Hausherr, Aug 24 '15 at 10:31
Then please edit your question to mention that you're using 2.0. Have you looked at the EmbeddedFonts.java example? https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/pdfbox/trunk/examples/src/main/java/org/apache/pdfbox/examples/pdmodel/EmbeddedFonts.java?view=markup&sortby=date — Tilman Hausherr, Aug 24 '15 at 10:57
I have now tried the EmbeddedFonts.java example. I can get the bullet character using that specific font. This will serve my purpose fine :-) — tcelvis, Aug 24 '15 at 11:08
Just to clarify, can I then only use the LiberationSans-Regular.ttf font to render a bullet?. — tcelvis, Aug 24 '15 at 11:09
Glad it works. If you like, answer your question yourself, so that it will help others :-) — Tilman Hausherr, Aug 24 '15 at 11:09
OK, thanks. Is there any way to see if a Windows font has that symbol? Other than trial and error? — tcelvis, Aug 24 '15 at 11:13

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

2

The solution, in this case, was to use the font included with PDFBox 2.0 (LiberationSans-Regular.ttf).

As a follow-up, I will now try to check which standard Windows fonts can render the bullet character. Perhaps by iterating over the fonts in the Windows/Fonts folder and checking using the PDType0Font.hasGlyph() method.

Thanks Tilman :-)

edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

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answered Aug 24 '15 at 11:29

tcelvis

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Create a bullet list item using PDFBox

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