PDF's using iText in 10 lines

Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

There are some getting started tutorials for the iText library but I don’t think they really capture how fast and easy it is to get working PDF’s.

Your standard servlet hello world example is 10 super simple lines.

In your servlets doGet method:

	response.setContentType("application/pdf");
	Document document = new Document();
	try {
		PdfWriter.getInstance(document, response.getOutputStream());
		document.open();
		document.add(new Paragraph("Hello world"));
		document.close();
	} catch (DocumentException e) { //handle the error }

to break that down:

First you need to let the browser know via the http response headers that the content is a pdf.

Pdf on David Hamp-Gonsalves

PDF's using iText in 10 lines

to break that down: