Using iText to convert HTML to PDF

Question

Does anyone know if it is possible to convert a HTML page (url) to a PDF using iText?

If the answer is 'no' than that is OK as well since I will stop wasting my time trying to work it out and just spend some money on one of a number of components which I know can :)

Thanks in advance for your responses!

Answer 1

I think this is exactly what you were looking for

http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/06/26/generating-pdfs-with-flying-saucer-and-itext.html

http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer

Flying Saucer's primary purpose is to render spec-compliant XHTML and CSS 2.1 to the screen as a Swing component. Though it was originally intended for embedding markup into desktop applications (things like the iTunes Music Store), Flying Saucer has been extended work with iText as well. This makes it very easy to render XHTML to PDFs, as well as to images and to the screen. Flying Saucer requires Java 1.4 or higher.

Answer 2

The easiest way of doing this is using pdfHTML. It's an iText7 add-on that converts HTML5 (+CSS3) into pdf syntax.

The code is pretty straightforward:

    HtmlConverter.convertToPdf(
        "<b>This text should be written in bold.</b>",       // html to be converted
        new PdfWriter(
            new File("C://users/mark/documents/output.pdf")  // destination file
        )
    );

To learn more, go to http://itextpdf.com/itext7/pdfHTML

Answer 3

When I needed HTML to PDF conversion earlier this year, I tried the trial of Winnovative HTML to PDF converter (I think ExpertPDF is the same product, too). It worked great so we bought a license at that company. I don't go into it too in depth after that.

Answer 4

I have ended up using ABCPdf from webSupergoo. It works really well and for about $350 it has saved me hours and hours based on your comments above. Thanks again Daniel and Bratch for your comments.

Answer 5

The answer to your question is actually two-fold. First of all you need to specify what you intend to do with the rendered HTML: save it to a new PDF file, or use it within another rendering context (i.e. add it to some other document you are generating).

The former is relatively easily accomplished using the Flying Saucer framework, which can be found here: https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer

The latter is actually a much more comprehensive problem that needs to be categorized further. Using iText you won't be able to (trivially, at least) combine iText elements (i.e. Paragraph, Phrase, Chunk and so on) with the generated HTML. You can hack your way out of this by using the ContentByte's addTemplate method and generating the HTML to this template.

If you on the other hand want to stamp the generated HTML with something like watermarks, dates or the like, you can do this using iText.

So bottom line: You can't trivially integrate the rendered HTML in other pdf generating contexts, but you can render HTML directly to a blank PDF document.

Answer 6

Use iText's HTMLWorker

Example