Java library for creating fluid page layouts with Apache PDFBox.
Please check the test files to see how to create PDFs with the different elements.
The basic elements provided are:
PageLayoutPDF
- the entry class, having a list of page setsPLPageSet
- a set of pages that share the same size and orientation and contain a set of elements. The assignments to pages happens dynamically.- PL elements - basic or complex layout elements ("PL" is short for "PDF Layout")
- Basic (inline) elements are
- plain text in class
PLText
(Unicode of course)- For custom Open Source fonts to be used see the https://github.com/phax/ph-fonts project
- Note: the available characters heavily depend on the used font. So if you get a "?" character, try loading a different font
- and image in classes
PLImage
andPLStreamImage
(whatever ImageIO can load).
- plain text in class
- Basic (block) element is box (class
PLBox
) - Layout elements are
- horizontal box or h-box in class
PLHBox
- like a row of a table - vertical box or v-box in class
PLVBox
- like a column of a table - spacer-x in class
PLSpacerX
- a horizontal spacer - just in case you need explicit distance to a certain element - spacer-y in class
PLSpacerY
- a vertical spacer - just in case you need explicit distance to a certain element - page break in class
PLPageBreak
- an explicit page break that starts a new page
- horizontal box or h-box in class
- The most complex element is a table, which consists of a number of "h-boxes" (rows) which itself consist of a number of "v-boxes" (columns) plus comes with repeating headlines etc.
- See classes
PLTable
,PLTableRow
andPLTableCell
for details
- See classes
- Elements can have the following properties - if you know CSS you should be familiar with it:
- "min-size" - the minimum element size
- "max-size" - the maximum element size
- "margin" - a transparent outer border (outside of the border)
- "border" - a visible border with different styles (between padding and margin)
- "padding" - a transparent inner border (inside of the border)
- "fill-color" - the background or fill color of an element
- Basic (inline) elements are
A set of example files as created from the unit test can be found in folder example-files. The source code for these examples is https://github.com/phax/ph-pdf-layout/tree/master/src/test/java/com/helger/pdflayout
Similar libraries in this context:
- https://github.com/ralfstuckert/pdfbox-layout - seems to focus more on text layouting
Add the following to your pom.xml to use this artifact, replacing x.y.z
with the real version number:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.helger</groupId>
<artifactId>ph-pdf-layout4</artifactId>
<version>x.y.z</version>
</dependency>
Between v4.0.0 and v5.2.2 the artifactId
was called ph-pdf-layout4
- v7.3.4 - 2024-05-30
- Fixed an issue with
BLOCK
horizontal alignment in case of a page break. See issue #36
- Fixed an issue with
- v7.3.3 - 2024-05-29
- Updated to PDFBox 3.0.2
- Added new horizontal alignment type
BLOCK
as a mixture ofLEFT
andJUSTIFY
. See issue #36 - thx @istvangaal
- v7.3.2 - 2024-03-27
- Updated to ph-commons 11.1.5
- Created Java 21 compatibility
- Extracted a parent POM and prepared a submodule structure
- Using https://github.com/red6/pdfcompare to test created PDFs against the stored ones. See issue #35 - thx @Lolf1010
- v7.3.1 - 2024-01-24
- Updated to PDFBox 3.0.1
- Added support for clipping content of block elements via
.setClipContent(boolean)
. See issue #34 - thx @terrason
- v7.3.0 - 2023-10-30
- Completely removed usage of
java.awt.Color
. Backwards incompatible change. This finalizes issue #32.
- Completely removed usage of
- v7.2.0 - 2023-10-30
- Added new class
PLColor
and deprecated all methods usingjava.awt.Color
. Backwards incompatible change. See issue #32 - thx @AndroidDeveloperLB
- Added new class
- v7.1.0 - 2023-08-20
- Updated to PDFBox 3.0.0
- v7.0.1 - 2023-07-31
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.29
- Updated to ph-commons 11.1.0
- Improved API to create an empty cell. See issue #29 - thx @fheldt
- v7.0.0 - 2022-09-14
- Using Java 11 as the baseline
- Updated to ph-commons 11
- v6.0.3 - 2022-08-17
- Added support for PDF/A creation in
PageLayoutPDF
- thx @robertholfeld for publishing this in his branch
- Added support for PDF/A creation in
- v6.0.2 - 2022-05-25
- Extended
PDPageContentStreamWithCache
API. See issue #23 - thx @schneidh
- Extended
- v6.0.1 - 2022-05-07
- Updated to jbig2-imageio 3.0.4
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.26
- Added support for creating external links via new class
PLExternalLink
. See issue #14 - thx @rgarg-atheer and @martin19
- v6.0.0 - 2022-01-05
- Changed artifactId from
ph-pdf-layout4
toph-pdf-layout
- Changed Java namespaces
com.helger.pdflayout4.*
tocom.helger.pdflayout.*
- Changed artifactId from
- v5.2.2 - 2021-12-29
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.25
- Extended
IPLHasMargin
with(set|add)Margin(X|Y)
to set or add to vertical or horizontal margin at once - Extended
IPLHasPadding
with(set|add)Padding(X|Y)
to set or add to vertical or horizontal padding at once
- v5.2.1 - 2021-03-22
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.23
- v5.2.0 - 2021-03-21
- Updated to ph-commons 10
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.22
- Add syntactic sugar method
PLTableCell.createEmptyCell()
- v5.1.2 - 2020-06-15
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.20
- Allow different page content height if the first page header and footer have different heights. See issue #14.
- v5.1.1 - 2020-05-29
- Updated to ph-fonts 4.1.0 (changed Maven groupId)
- v5.1.0 - 2020-03-29
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.19
- Updated to jbig2-imageio 3.0.3
- Fixed line spacing on page break (see issue #10)
- Allow table columns with different
WidthSpec
types, as long as colspan is1
. - Added another generic parameter to
IPLSplittableObject
- Made
PageLayoutPDF
API more chainable - New class
PLBulletPointList
can be used to create regular bullet point lists (see issue #9) - Updated to ph-commons 9.4.0
- v5.0.9 - 2019-04-29
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.15 (security update)
- v5.0.8 - 2018-11-22
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.12
- Updated to ph-commons 9.2.0
- v5.0.7 - 2018-07-10
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.11
- v5.0.6 - 2018-06-21
- Updated to org.apache.pdfbox:jbig2-imageio for JPEG handling
- Fixed OSGI ServiceProvider configuration
- Updated to ph-commons 9.1.2
- v5.0.5 - 2018-04-16
- Something went wrong when publishing to Maven Central - next try
- v5.0.4 - 2018-04-16
- Do not justify the last line of multiline text
- v5.0.3 - 2018-04-16
- Added
ph-collection
dependency for issue #4 - Updated to PDFBox 2.0.9
- Added possibility to justify text
- Added
- v5.0.2 - 2018-02-21
- Added possibility to use special page header and footer on the first page of a PLPageSet
- v5.0.1 - 2018-02-12
- Added image type support (issue #3)
- Updated to BouncyCastle 1.59
- Added new table grid types
- v5.0.0 - 2017-11-09
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.8
- Updated to ph-commons 9.0.0
- Updated to BouncyCastle 1.58
- v4.0.1 - 2017-05-16
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.6
- Slight API extensions
- v4.0.0 - 2017-02-22
- No change compared to 4.0.0 Beta 5
- v4.0.0 Beta 5 - 2017-01-19
- Improved XML serialization slightly
- Fixed an NPE with PLBox without a contained element
- v4.0.0 Beta 4 - 2017-01-10
- Block elements use full width now by default
- Improved placeholder handling in text preparation
- v4.0.0 Beta 3 - 2017-01-10
- Binds to ph-commons 8.6.x
- Fixed a height problem with vertical split HBoxes
- Simplified class hierarchy for table rows
- Made font fallback code point more flexible
- Changed font rendering to use descent from font instead of heuristics
- Fixed different border color rendering
- Made debug rendering customizable
- Added support for line spacing in PLText
- v4.0.0 Beta 2 - 2017-01-03
- The Maven artifact name was changed to 'ph-pdf-layout4' so that it can be used side-by-side with version 3.
- The global package name was changed from
com.helger.pdflayout
tocom.helger.pdflayout4
so that both 3.x and 4.x can run side-by-side - This is major rewrite to be closer to the CSS box model
- VBox and HBox have no more layout information assigned to them
- Added a new element "Box" that allows for easy alignment etc.
- Separation between renderable objects, block element (box) and inline elements (text and image)
- New class design for tables, so that each table cell is automatically represented by a box, each table row is a separate object
- Added a simple grid system for tables to build the default grids easily
- Added new "auto" width/height for columns/rows
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.4
- v3.5.3 - 2017-11-07
- Binds to ph-commons 9.0.0
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.8
- Updated to BouncyCastle 1.58
- v3.5.2 - 2017-01-10
- Binds to ph-commons 8.6.x
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.4
- v3.5.1 - 2016-10-07
- Fixed a rendering flaw with borders
- v3.5.0 - 2016-09-21
- Changed internal class hierarchy to prepare for future changes
- Changed package assignments for better grouping
- v3.0.3 - 2016-09-19
- Updated to PDFBox 2.0.3
- Performance improvement by using optimized writer
- Included optional MicroTypeConverters
- v3.0.2 - 2016-09-06
- API extensions for the classes in the "spec" package
- v3.0.1 - never released because of issues with the release script :(
- v3.0.0 - 2016-08-21
- Requires JDK 8
- Still on PDFBox 2.0.0 because of problems with 2.0.1 and 2.0.2
Version starting with 2.1.0 uses PDFBox 2.x, previous versions (up to and including 2.0.0) use PDFBox 1.8.x. Note: version 4.0.0 has troubles building with JDK 1.8.0_92 - updating to 1.8.0_112 or later should work.
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