iText Document Generator: PDF Generation Made Easy

by Benoy Jose

The portable document format (PDF) is the most commonly used document format in the industry, mainly due to its simplicity and portability. PDF has become the standard format for generating company reports, brochures, and presentations. Hence today's applications are expected to generate reports in numerous formats including HTML, rich text, and PDF. Most application servers and other server software provide direct support for generating HTML, text, and rich text documents, but there are no application servers that provide PDF document-generation support. iText is a Java based API that fills this gap by providing a simple, easy-to-use PDF document generator.

iText has a simple API, which can be used to simultaneously generate PDF, rich text, and HTML documents.

Features

• Easy-to-use Java API
• Writes to any Java output stream
• Generates multiple outputs like HTML, RTF, and PDF simultaneously.
• Supports for underlining, strike-through text, skewed text, subscript, and superscript
• Nested Tables
• Watermarks
• Security and Encryption
• Extended font support
• Barcode support
• Event support
• Parses existing PDF files
• Support for Adobe JavaScript
• XML Support
• Templates

For more: http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/iText/index.html