Silent Printing of PDF From Within Java

Question

We are looking into silent printing of PDF documents from within Java. The printing will be invoked from the desktop and not through a browser so we cannot use JavaScript. PDF Renderer is an operational solution but their rendering quality is not acceptable. iText does not seem to be pluggable with the Java print service. There are some commercial Java libraries, jPDFPrint by Qoppa, JPedal, and ICEpdf which we have not tried out yet.

Does anybody have any experience with PDF silent printing from Java?

Answer 1

Apache PDFBox. It is currently in incubation, but the PDF printing functionality has been around before that. Internally, it uses the Java Print Services to create a print job, and it also supports silent printing.

Do note that it requires Fontbox as well, and the current (upcoming 0.8.0 release) has included graceful fallback for documents with Type 0 fonts. Type 1 fonts are printed correctly; however in 0.7.3, attempts to print documents with Type 0 fonts will result in an exception being thrown.