Question

I’m having trouble to set underline and overline by using PdfContentByte in iText. I want to set underline to all field in sectionArea == 1 || section Area == 3 as mentioned in getFontForFormat. So far i can only do bold style and i need it to be underlined and overlined too.
Here is the code:

public void doOutputField(Field field) {
    String fieldAsString = field.toString();
    BaseFont baseFont = getFontForFormat(field);
    float fontSize = 11;

    Point bottomLeft = bottomLeftOfField(field, 11, baseFont);

    int align;

    align = PdfContentByte.ALIGN_LEFT;

    //PdfContentByte content
    content.beginText();
    content.setFontAndSize(baseFont, fontSize);

    content.setColorFill(Color.BLACK);

    double lineHeight = field.getOutputHeight();

    content.showTextAligned(align, fieldAsString, (float) bottomLeft.x,
                (float) bottomLeft.y, 0f);

    bottomLeft.y -= lineHeight;

    content.endText();
}

public BaseFont getFontForFormat(Field field) {

    try {
        if (field.getSection().getArea().getArea() == 1
                || field.getSection().getArea().getArea() == 3) {
            BaseFont bf = BaseFont.createFont(BaseFont.TIMES_BOLD,
                    BaseFont.CP1252, BaseFont.NOT_EMBEDDED);
            return bf;
        } else {
            BaseFont bf = BaseFont.createFont("Times-Roman",
                    BaseFont.CP1252, BaseFont.NOT_EMBEDDED);
            return bf;
        }
    } catch (Exception e) {
    }
    return null;
}

Thanks in advance

Edit (Solved by Bruno Lowagie):

This problem can be solved by utilizing ColumnText.

  if (field.getSection().getArea().getArea() == 1
            || field.getSection().getArea().getArea() == 3) {

        Chunk chunk = new Chunk(fieldAsString);
        chunk.setUnderline(+1f, -2f);

        if (field.getSection().getArea().getArea() == 3) {
            chunk.setUnderline(+1f, (float) field.getBoundHeight());
        }

          Font font = new Font();
          font.setFamily("Times Roman");
          font.setStyle(Font.BOLD);
          font.setSize((float) 11);
          chunk.setFont(font);

          Paragraph p = new Paragraph();
          p.add(chunk);

         ColumnText ct = new ColumnText(content);
         ct.setSimpleColumn(p, (float)bottomLeft.x, (float)bottomLeft.y,
             (float)field.getBoundWidth() + (float)bottomLeft.x,
             (float)field.getBoundHeight() + (float)bottomLeft.y,
             (float)lineHeight, align);
             try {
             ct.go();
             } catch (DocumentException e) {
             // TODO Auto-generated catch block
             e.printStackTrace();
             }
    }

Thanks

Answer 1

You’re making it yourself difficult by using PdfContentByte.showTextAligned(). Is there any reason why you don’t want to use ColumnText?

With PdfContentByte, you have to handle the text state —beginText() and endText()—, the font —setFontAndSize()—, and you can only add String values. If you want to add lines (e.g. to underline), you need moveTo(), lineTo(), stroke() operations. These operators need coordinates, so you’ll need to measure the size of the line using the BaseFont in combination with the String and the font size. There’s some math involved.

If you use ColumnText, you have the option of adding one line at a time using ColumnText.showTextAligned(). Or you can define a column using setSimpleColumn() and let iText take care of distributing the text over different lines. In both cases, you don’t have to worry about handling the text state, nor about the font and size. ColumnText accepts Phrase objects, and these objects consists of Chunk objects for which you can define underline and overline values. In this case, iText does all the math for you.