Question

What is the recommended way of printing a text document as a pdf using absolute positioning ?
I am having a table that I have to print. I am also having the data type lengths and starting positions of the columns.
Since the existing table was a character based, there was no problem in its positioning. But even after using a monotype font (Courier, 10) I am not able to properly position the data and last column(s) of each row erroneously skip to the next line.

In order to present my data as close as the character one, I divided the page into different columns(based on its page size) and then add the contents at the desired place. I am adding chunks of data into the paragraph.

paragraph.add(new Chunk(new VerticalPositionMark(), columnNo*ptUnit, false));

I have tried to tweak the page size, font size and margin lengths, but the data is not properly displayed. Have you encountered any such problems ? please do share your thoughts.

Answer 1

Have you tried ColumnText

When i want to write a paragraph and I do know the amount of lines…I do a cycle incrementing (even it says incrementing and is minus is because the pdf is from “south” to “north” (0 – height) the y in a proportion of the fontsize, something like this

//_valueArray is my string[]
//fontSize is the value of the Size of the font...
//1.5 it's just a magic number :) that give me the space line that i need
//cbLocal is the PdfContentByte of the pdf
for (i = 0; i < _valueArray.Length; i++)
{
    var p = new Phrase(_valueArray[i], font);
    ColumnText.ShowTextAligned(cbLocal, align, p, x, y, 0);
    if (i + 1 != _valueArray.Length)
    {
        y = y - (fontSize*1.5f);
    }
}