Compare these products for PDF generation with Java given requirements inside: iText, Apache PDFBox or FOP? [closed]

Answer 1

1. iText; nowadays iText is a commercial library, the latest version is not for free anymore (a fork of an older version remains under MIT license: OpenPDF)
2. FOP; I worked a lot with FOP. It's fairly resource intensive (Java > XML > XSLT > PDF) and complex PDFs become a nightmare ( may result in XSLTs with 20k+ LoC)
3. PDFBox; it seems to be the best alternative although I did not work with it in large projects
4. Did not check Flying Saucer yet

To conclude, I'd give PDFBox a try. Depending on your bar code requirements you may need to inline your barcode (font) into the PDF or distribute the font to your clients - take care of those issues.

Answer 2

Another thumbs up for flying-saucer. It works quite well and is easy to use if you're familiar with html and css.

What isn't really documented is how to access iTexts built-in barcode functionality. However this can be easily accomplished. I've put up a short tutorial here: http://andreas.haufler.info/2012/12/generating-barcodes-in-pdfs-with-flying.html

Answer 3

nobody is talking about BFO(Big faceless) though it's commercial

Answer 4

I think your criteria can be met with both iText and Apahce FOp but here you have some additional criteria:

• licensing: FOP is based on Apache license and therefore "friendly" also for commercial use
• flexbility: a low level API like iText is more flexible than high level FOP
• Visual tools: there is one designer for FOP here.
• Programing Model: iText is based on programming API while FOP requires a XSLFO template and less programming.
• Proprietary vs standard. Apache FOP is based on a standard and therefore vendor independent, while iText is a proprietaRy API
• Performace: It is said FOP is more computing intensive. it depends of course of what your target PDF files are. It was a never issue for me using FOP.

I would not use PDFBox, it is good for reading and modifying an existing PDF file but createing a file from scratch using PDFBox can be a lot of work.

Answer 5

I've done a project with Flying Saucer http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer/ which is based on iText. It's free, easy to use, has great support for CSS, and has nice open source.

Answer 6

It depends how exactly you want to create the PDF as well. FOP works from XML, IText lets you create programmatically from Java.