Print rich text string with all effect and styles in pdf using iTextSharp

Question

I am trying to print rich text content in pdf using itextSharp library with version 5.5.8.0. But I am I am printing that rich text, it will print only normal string without any style effect or html tags.

Here is my web view that contain rich text

But while printing in pdf using iTexhSharp, it will print like rich text but each html element it will start printing with new line, as like below image

Here is the code, that I am using to print rich text in pdf:

ElementList elements = XMLWorkerHelper.ParseToElementList(descriptionData, "");

                PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell();
                foreach(var ele in elements) {
                    cellDescriptionData.AddElement(ele);
                }

                tableThirdBlock.AddCell(cellDescriptionData);

Here the "descriptionData" field will contain the html string.

I want to be print the same in pdf as available in web view.

Here is the actual HTML string, which is generated dynamically. So the html string will be dynamic with dynamic css and text.

" <b style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(204, 255, 255); background-color: rgb(51, 102, 255);">zzz&nbsp;</b><div style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"><b style="color: rgb(204, 255, 255); background-color: rgb(51, 102, 255);"><br /></b></div><div><b style="font-family: Arial, Verdana; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(204, 255, 255); background-color: rgb(51, 102, 255);">Test &nbsp;</b> &nbsp; <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: bold;">Description</span> &nbsp;</span><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153); font-style: italic;">Other Color</span></div> ".

Is anything wrong, that I am missing ?

Please help me to print rich text with all effect and styles in pdf.

Thanks

Answer 1

I your comment, you are asking for an example on how to use XML Worker to parse HTML to a list of Element objects. Such an example can be found on the official iText web site in the answers to question such as:

• How to adjust the page height to the content height? 1
• How to convert Arabic HTML to PDF? 2

In 1, you'll discover that you can parse an HTML and CSS file to an ElementList object:

ElementList elements = XMLWorkerHelper.parseToElementList(HTML, CSS);

In 2, you'll learn how to add the elements in an ElementList to a PdfPCell:

PdfPTable table = new PdfPTable(1);
PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell();
for (Element e : elements) {
    cell.addElement(e);
}
table.addCell(cell);
document.add(table);

Note that I simplified the examples from the original questions. You don't need RTL because your text probably isn't Arabic. You can probably use the convenience method parseToElementList() instead of using the full code that was used in 2.

I have created a proof of concept that results in the file test-herin.pdf:

The HTML to get this result looks like this:

<div><span class="bluetextwhitebackground">zzz</span></div>
<div>
<span class="bluetextwhitebackground">Test</span>
<span class="redtext">Description</span>
<span class="italicpurple">Other Color</span>
</div>

The CSS to get the desired styles looks like this:

.bluetextwhitebackground
    { font-family: times; color: white; background: blue}
.redtext
    { font-family: times; color: red; }
.italicpurple
    { font-family: times; font-style: italic; color: purple }

As you can see, I used <div> when I want a block of text that causes a new line after the text is rendered. I used <span> in cases where I don't want a new line to appear.

It is hard to answer your question because you don't show your HTML. New lines are triggered when using <p> or <div> tags, or by defining something as a div in the CSS.

By the way, the code to generate the PDF can be found here: ParseHtml13

Update:

After you shared the HTML, I created another proof of concept:

The resulting PDF file is test-herin2.pdf and it looks like this:

This looks exactly the way I expect it. In other words: I can't reproduce the problem you're describing. If I can't reproduce a problem, I can't fix it.