Question

I’m using iText to generate a PDF document that consists of several copies of almost the same information.

E.g.: An invoice. One copy is given to the customer, another is filed and a third one is given to an accountant for book-keeping.

All the copies must be exactly the same except for a little piece of text that indicates who is the copy to (Customer, Accounting, File, …).

There are two possible scenarios (I don’t know if the solution is the same for both of them):

a) Each copy goes in a different page.

b) All the copies goes in the same page (the paper will have cutting holes to separete copies).

There will be a wrapper or helper class which uses iText to generate the PDF in order to be able to do something like var pdf = HelperClass.CreateDocument(DocuemntInfo info);. The multiple-copies problem will be solved inside this wrapper/helper.

What does iText provides to accomplish this? Do I need to write each element in the document several times in different positions/pages? Or does iText provide some way to write one copy to the document and then copy it to other position/page?

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Note: It’s a .Net project, but I tagged the question with both java and c# because this qustion is about how to use iText properly the answer will help both laguage developers.

Answer 1

Here’s how I see this working.

PdfReader reader = new PdfReader( templatePDFPath );
Document doc = new Document();
PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.createInstance( doc, new FileOutputStream("blah.pdf" ) );

PdfImportedPage inputPage = writer.getImportedPage( reader, 1 );

PdfDirectContent curPageContent = writer.getDirectContent();

String extraStuff[] = getExtraStuff();

for (String stuff : extraStuff) {
  curPageContent.saveState();
  curPageContent.addTemplate( inputPage /*, x, y*/ );
  curPageContent.restoreState();

  curPageContent.beginText();
  curPageContent.setTextMatrix(x, y);
  curPageContent.setFontAndSize( someFont, someSize );

  // the actual work:
  curPageContent.showText( stuff );

  curPageContent.EndText();       

  // save the contents of curPageContent out to the file and reset it for the next page.
  doc.newPage();
}

That’s the bare minimum of work on the computer’s part. Quite Efficient, and it’ll result in a smaller PDF. Rather than having N copies of that page, with tweaks, you have one copy of that page that’s reused on N pages, with little tweaks on top.

You could do the same thing, and use the “x,y” parameters in addTemplate to draw them all on the same page. Up to you.

PS: you’ll need to figure out the coordinates for setTextMatrix in advance.