Read Write PDF file using Java

In this article, we will see some examples for creating and reading a PDF file using Apache PDFBox.

We can create a Java project using an IDE like Eclipse or use a build tool like Maven to create a java project.

 
Here is the maven archetype we will be using :

mvn archetype:generate –DgroupId=com.mycompany.app –DartifactId=PDFUtil –DarchetypeArtifactId=maven–archetype–quickstart –DinteractiveMode=false

 
Add the following dependency for Apache PDFBox:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
  <artifactId>pdfbox</artifactId>
  <version>2.0.0</version>
</dependency>

 
For maven basics, refer this article :

Maven Basics
 
If you are creating the project directly using Eclipse, the jar file can be downloaded from http://pdfbox.apache.org
 

Creating a PDF and writing to it

 
In this example, we will create a PDF file and write some text to it.

package com.mycompany.app;

import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDPage;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDPageContentStream;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDType1Font;

/**
 * Hello world!
 *
 */
public class App 
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        try {
     createPDFDocument("C:\\blogs\\TestPDF.pdf");
  } catch (IOException e) {
           e.printStackTrace();
  }
    }
    
    private static void createPDFDocument(String name) throws IOException{
      // Create a new empty document
      PDDocument document = new PDDocument();
      
      // Create a new blank page and add it to the document
      PDPage page = new PDPage();
      document.addPage( page );
      
      // Create a new font object selecting one of the PDF base fonts
      PDFont font = PDType1Font.TIMES_ROMAN;
      
      // Start a new content stream which will "hold" the to be created content
      PDPageContentStream contentStream = new PDPageContentStream(document, page);

      // Define a text content stream using the selected font, moving the cursor and drawing the text "Hello World"
      contentStream.beginText();
      contentStream.setFont( font, 12 );
      contentStream.moveTextPositionByAmount( 100, 700 );
      contentStream.drawString( "Hello World" );
      contentStream.endText();
      // Make sure that the content stream is closed:
      contentStream.close();
      // Save the newly created document
      document.save(name);

      // finally make sure that the document is properly
      // closed.
      document.close();
    }

 

Output :

 

 

Reading Text from the PDF

 

Add the following method to read the text from the PDF file.

    private static void readPDFDocument(String name) throws IOException{
      PDDocument pdf = PDDocument.load(new File(name));
      PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
      String pdfText = stripper.getText(pdf);
      System.out.println("Text from the pdf is : " + pdfText);
    }

 

    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        try {
          readPDFDocument("C:\\blogs\\TestPDF.pdf");
    } catch (IOException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    }

 

Output :

 
Text from the pdf is : Hello World

 

Reference

 
http://pdfbox.apache.org

 

You may also like :

Write to Excel file in Java

Read from Excel file in Java

Read a File in Java

 
 

© 2016, https:. All rights reserved. On republishing this post, you must provide link to original post