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I Text, You Text, We All Text for iText


By Allen Holub
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January 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
I have a soft place in my heart for typesetting systems. I’ve built several over the ages, and have typeset many of my own books. My monthly C Chest column in Dr. Dobb’s Journal was canned in 1987 largely because of my “wasting” three months presenting the source code for my version of a markup-language interpreter that did layout: troff. (The editor insisted that both Unix and markup languages were irrelevant, obsolete technologies. For what it’s worth, Bill Gates was saying exactly the same thing about HTML at the time.)

I’m going to try my luck again: In my Dec. 15 column, I promised that I’d report back on a typesetting system: iText, Bruno Lowagie and Paulo Soares’ PDF-creation library. Let’s pick up that thread.

To refresh your memory, a project required me to create a few simple printed reports—the complete contents of which weren’t known until runtime—in CSV, HTML and PDF formats. I rejected JasperReports, which I found to be an overly complicated, poorly documented nonsolution to this problem. You know something’s wrong when it’s harder to use the tool than it is not to use the tool.

The iText library—the PDF-generation library that JasperReports uses—is, on the other hand, very good. iText is a full-blown typesetting system that lets you do in Java pretty much everything you can do with PostScript. You can use iText to lay out complex documents containing both text and images to produce a PDF representation. (Note that iText also can produce HTML and RTF files, but it doesn’t do as good a job in these formats as it does with PDF. The table-layout classes, essential for reporting applications, work only with PDF output, for example.)

Though it does have all the low-level APIs that you need to build a real typesetting system, the real strength of iText is the high-level objects that let you manipulate the document at the level of paragraph and chunk. (A chunk is part of a paragraph.) You assemble a paragraph simply by adding chunks of text to it, and can easily modify paragraph attributes like font size and margins. There’s also a very nice set of table-creation objects. The vast majority of applications can get by with nothing but these simple-to-use APIs.




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