iText HTML to PDF Example

Chandan SinghNovember 16th, 2015Last Updated: March 19th, 2019

8 612 2 minutes read

In the previous examples, we have studied about various Itext Classes like PDFTable, PDFStamper,PDFRectangle etc. that help us in creation of the PDF document. In this example, we will demonstrate when we already have a document in HTML format and need to convert it to a PDF Document.

1. Project Set-Up

We shall use Maven to setup our project. Open eclipse and create a simple Maven project and check the skip archetype selection checkbox on the dialogue box that appears. Replace the content of the existing pom.xml with the pom.xml below:

pom.xml

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>ItextHtmlToPDFExample</groupId>
  <artifactId>ItextHtmlToPDFExample</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  
  <dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>com.itextpdf</groupId>
			<artifactId>itextpdf</artifactId>
			<version>5.5.6</version>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.bouncycastle</groupId>
			<artifactId>bcprov-jdk15on</artifactId>
			<version>1.52</version>
		</dependency>

		<dependency>
			<groupId>com.itextpdf.tool</groupId>
			<artifactId>xmlworker</artifactId>
			<version>5.5.7</version>
		</dependency>

	</dependencies>
</project>

In this example, we have added one more dependency for the Xmlworker JAR. That’s all from setting-up project point of view, let’s start with the actual code writing now:

2. Implementation

We will convert the below HTML document into a PDF document:

<html><body align='center'> This is my Project 
<table border='2' align='center'>
<tr>
		<td>
			JavaCodeGeeks
		</td>
		<td>
			<a href='examples.javacodegeeks.com'>JavaCodeGeeks</a>
		</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>
			Google Here
		</td>
		<td>
			<a href='www.google.com'>Google</a>
		</td>
	</tr>
</table>

Here’s the how the document looks like in a browser(CHROME here):

The com.itextpdf.tool.xml.XMLWorkerHelper converts the XHTML code to PDF. The Xhtml is a stricter version of HTML which ensures the document are well-formed and hence can be parsed efficiently by the standard XML parsers. Not closing the tags or any other syntax errors can lead to exception like :

com.itextpdf.tool.xml.exceptions.RuntimeWorkerException: Invalid nested tag html found, expected closing tag body.

Now that we are clear with the basics let’s write the code for the actual conversion:

ItextHtmlToPDFExample.java

package com.jcg.examples;


import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;

import com.itextpdf.text.Document;
import com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfWriter;
import com.itextpdf.tool.xml.XMLWorkerHelper;


public class ItextHtmlToPDFExample
{
	public static void main(String[] args)
	{
		try
		{
               OutputStream file = new FileOutputStream(new File("HTMLtoPDF.pdf"));
			Document document = new Document();
			PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, file);
			StringBuilder htmlString = new StringBuilder();
			htmlString.append(new String("<html><body> This is HMTL to PDF conversion Example<table border='2' align='center'> "));
			htmlString.append(new String("<tr><td>JavaCodeGeeks</td><td><a href='examples.javacodegeeks.com'>JavaCodeGeeks</a> </td></tr>"));				
			htmlString.append(new String("<tr> <td> Google Here </td> <td><a href='www.google.com'>Google</a> </td> </tr></table></body></html>"));
							
			document.open();
			InputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(htmlString.toString().getBytes());
			XMLWorkerHelper.getInstance().parseXHtml(writer, document, is);
			document.close();
			file.close();
		}
		catch (Exception e)
		{
			e.printStackTrace();
		}

	}

}

We create an instance of the Document and FileOutputStream and pass it the PDFWriter. Now we create a StringBuilder object which holds the HTML source code. The XMLWorker class accepts the Byte Array of the HTML source code. XMLWorkerHelper.getInstance().parseXHtml() method parses the HTML source code and writes to the document created earlier via the PDFWriter instance.