Can't set RTL direction for Hebrew letters while converting from *.xhtml to *.pdf by using iText library

Question

I\'m trying to convert *.xhtml with Hebrew characters (UTF-8) to PDF by using iText library but I getting all letter in reverse order. As far I understand from this question I

Answer 1

Please take a look at the ParseHtml10 example. In this example, we have take the file hebrew.html:

  



שלום עולם

And we convert it to PDF using this code:

public void createPdf(String file) throws IOException, DocumentException {
    // step 1
    Document document = new Document();
    // step 2
    PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream(file));
    // step 3
    document.open();
    // step 4
    // Styles
    CSSResolver cssResolver = new StyleAttrCSSResolver();
    XMLWorkerFontProvider fontProvider = new XMLWorkerFontProvider(XMLWorkerFontProvider.DONTLOOKFORFONTS);
    fontProvider.register("resources/fonts/NotoSansHebrew-Regular.ttf");
    CssAppliers cssAppliers = new CssAppliersImpl(fontProvider);
    HtmlPipelineContext htmlContext = new HtmlPipelineContext(cssAppliers);
    htmlContext.setTagFactory(Tags.getHtmlTagProcessorFactory());

    // Pipelines
    PdfWriterPipeline pdf = new PdfWriterPipeline(document, writer);
    HtmlPipeline html = new HtmlPipeline(htmlContext, pdf);
    CssResolverPipeline css = new CssResolverPipeline(cssResolver, html);

    // XML Worker
    XMLWorker worker = new XMLWorker(css, true);
    XMLParser p = new XMLParser(worker);
    p.parse(new FileInputStream(HTML), Charset.forName("UTF-8"));;
    // step 5
    document.close();
}

The result looks like hebrew.pdf:

What are the hurdles you need to take?

• You need to wrap your text in an element such as a
  or a .
• You need to add the attribute dir="rtl" to define the direction.
• You need to make sure that you're using a font that knows how to display Hebrew. I used a NOTO font for Hebrew. This is one of the fonts distributed by Google in their program to provide fonts for every possible language.

I can't read Hebrew, but I hope the resulting PDF is correct and that this solves your problem.

Important: this solution requires at least iText and XML Worker 5.5.5, because support for the dir attribute was introduced in 5.5.4 and improved in 5.5.5.