Generation of pdf file using java

Question

I am developing a standalone application in Java. I want to generate a pdf file using Java code. I have a display form in which all the details are fetched from database and displayed in the window. Details are Customer Name, Order Details etc.

Now I want to have a button there which says Convert to pdf. I want to convert this to pdf file with proper alignment and formatting like tables, font etc.

What can be an ideal way to go about it?

Answer 1

I'd suggest you to use reporting tool like a jasperreports.

JasperReports is entirely written in Java and it is able to use data coming from any kind of data source and produce pixel-perfect documents that can be viewed, printed or exported in a variety of document formats including HTML, PDF, Excel, OpenOffice and Word.

Have a look at other open source projects (pdf api):

1. Apache PDFBox
2. Apache Tika (Toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured text content from various documents using POI and PDFBOX parser libs.)
3. PDFjet