easytable

This is a (very) small project that builds upon Apache's PDFBox (>= 2.0.0) and should allow you to create tables in a fairly simple way. It emerged from the need in another project. Therefore it also may miss some crucial features. Nevertheless there is:

setting font and font size on table level as well as cell level
setting single cells with bottom-, top-, left- and right-border width separately
background color on row or cell level
padding (top, bottom, left, right) on cell level
border colors (on table, row or cell level)
support for text alignment (right, left or center)
vertical text alignment
row spanning
line breaking and line spacing
images in cells

Example

In order to produce a whole PDF document with a table that looks like this one:

You need the following code:

// Some data
final Object[][] data = {
        {"Whisky", 134.4, 145.98},
        {"Beer", 768.2, 677.9},
        {"Gin", 456.45, 612.0},
        {"Vodka", 302.71, 465.2}
};

// Define the table structure first
final TableBuilder tableBuilder = Table.builder()
        .addColumnOfWidth(100)
        .addColumnOfWidth(50)
        .addColumnOfWidth(50)
        .addColumnOfWidth(50)
        .fontSize(8)
        .font(HELVETICA)
        .borderColor(Color.WHITE);

// Add the header row ...
final Row headerRow = Row.builder()
        .add(CellText.builder().text("Product").borderWidth(1).build())
        .add(CellText.builder().text("2018").horizontalAlignment(CENTER).borderWidth(1).build())
        .add(CellText.builder().text("2019").horizontalAlignment(CENTER).borderWidth(1).build())
        .add(CellText.builder().text("Total").horizontalAlignment(CENTER).borderWidth(1).build())
        .backgroundColor(TableDrawerIntegrationTest.BLUE_DARK)
        .textColor(Color.WHITE)
        .font(PDType1Font.HELVETICA_BOLD)
        .fontSize(9)
        .build();

tableBuilder.addRow(headerRow);

// ... and some data rows
double grandTotal = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < data.length; i++) {
    final Object[] dataRow = data[i];
    final double total = (double) dataRow[1] + (double) dataRow[2];
    grandTotal += total;

    tableBuilder.addRow(Row.builder()
            .add(CellText.builder().text(String.valueOf(dataRow[0])).borderWidth(1).build())
            .add(CellText.builder().text(dataRow[1] + " €").horizontalAlignment(RIGHT).borderWidth(1).build())
            .add(CellText.builder().text(dataRow[2] + " €").horizontalAlignment(RIGHT).borderWidth(1).build())
            .add(CellText.builder().text(total + " €").horizontalAlignment(RIGHT).borderWidth(1).build())
            .backgroundColor(i % 2 == 0 ? TableDrawerIntegrationTest.BLUE_LIGHT_1 : TableDrawerIntegrationTest.BLUE_LIGHT_2)
            .build())
    .wordBreak(true);
}

// Add a final row
tableBuilder.addRow(Row.builder()
        .add(CellText.builder().text("This spans over 3 cells, is right aligned and its text is so long that it even breaks. " +
                "Also it shows the grand total in the next cell and furthermore vertical alignment is shown:")
                .span(3)
                .lineSpacing(1f)
                .borderWidthTop(1)
                .textColor(WHITE)
                .horizontalAlignment(RIGHT)
                .backgroundColor(TableDrawerIntegrationTest.BLUE_DARK)
                .fontSize(6)
                .font(HELVETICA_OBLIQUE)
                .borderWidth(1)
                .build())
        .add(CellText.builder().text(grandTotal + " €").backgroundColor(LIGHT_GRAY)
                .font(HELVETICA_BOLD_OBLIQUE)
                .horizontalAlignment(RIGHT)
                .verticalAlignment(TOP)
                .borderWidth(1)
                .build())
        .build());
        
 final PDDocument document = new PDDocument();
 final PDPage page = new PDPage(PDRectangle.A4);
 document.addPage(page);

 final PDPageContentStream contentStream = new PDPageContentStream(document, page);

 // Define the starting point
 final float startY = page.getMediaBox().getHeight() - 50;
 final int startX = 50;

 // Draw!
 TableDrawer.TableDrawerBuilder.newBuilder()
         .withContentStream(contentStream)
         .withTable(table)
         .startX(startX)
         .startY(startY)
         .build()
         .draw();
 contentStream.close();

 document.save(fileToSaveTo);
 document.close();

If you run the tests with mvn clean test there also some PDF documents created which you can find in the target folder. The corresponding sources (in order to understand how to use the code) can be found in the test package.

Installation

First check it out and install it locally:

git clone https://github.com/vandeseer/easytable.git
cd easytable
git checkout v0.1.0
mvn clean install

Define this in your pom.xml in order to use it:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.vandeseer.pdfbox</groupId>
    <artifactId>easytable</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.0</version>
</dependency>

At one point it will hopefully also be available at maven central.

Kudos

to Binghammer for implementing cell coloring and text center alignment
to Sebastian Göhring for finding and fixing a bug (column spanning)
to AndreKoepke for the line breaking feature, some bigger nice refactorings and improvements

Q&A

Does it work with Java < 8?

Nope. You will need Java 8.

Does it work with PDFBox 1.8.9?

Well, Using it with PDFBox 1.8.9 requires you to check out version 0.0.7 (tagged as such in git) and install it locally, i.e.:

git checkout v0.0.7
mvn clean install

Note though that the API will have changed in the meantime ...

Cool, I like it, can I buy you a beer?

Yes. Or you can upvote this answer on stackoverflow.

wapolinar / easytable