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)
• row spanning

I would say: it's OK, but don't expect too much ... ;-)

Example

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

You need the following code:

// Some data
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
TableBuilder tableBuilder = TableBuilder.newBuilder()
        .addColumnOfWidth(100)
        .addColumnOfWidth(50)
        .addColumnOfWidth(50)
        .addColumnOfWidth(50)
        .setFontSize(8)
        .setFont(HELVETICA)
        .setBorderColor(Color.WHITE);

// Add the header row ...
Row headerRow = RowBuilder.newBuilder()
        .add(Cell.withText("Product").withAllBorders())
        .add(Cell.withText("2018").withAllBorders().setHorizontalAlignment(CENTER))
        .add(Cell.withText("2019").withAllBorders().setHorizontalAlignment(CENTER))
        .add(Cell.withText("Total").withAllBorders().setHorizontalAlignment(CENTER))
        .setBackgroundColor(BLUE_DARK)
        .withTextColor(Color.WHITE)
        .setFont(PDType1Font.HELVETICA_BOLD)
        .setFontSize(9)
        .build();

tableBuilder.addRow(headerRow);

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

    tableBuilder.addRow(RowBuilder.newBuilder()
            .add(Cell.withText(dataRow[0]).withAllBorders())
            .add(Cell.withText(dataRow[1] + " €").withAllBorders().setHorizontalAlignment(RIGHT))
            .add(Cell.withText(dataRow[2] + " €").withAllBorders().setHorizontalAlignment(RIGHT))
            .add(Cell.withText(total + " €").withAllBorders().setHorizontalAlignment(RIGHT))
            .setBackgroundColor(i % 2 == 0 ? BLUE_LIGHT_1 : BLUE_LIGHT_2)
            .build());
}

// Add a final row
tableBuilder.addRow(RowBuilder.newBuilder()
        .add(Cell.withText("This spans over 3 cells and shows the grand total in the next cell:")
                .span(3)
                .setBorderWidthTop(1)
                .withTextColor(WHITE)
                .withAllBorders()
                .setHorizontalAlignment(RIGHT)
                .setBackgroundColor(BLUE_DARK)
                .withFontSize(6)
                .withFont(HELVETICA_OBLIQUE))
        .add(Cell.withText(grandTotal + " €").setBackgroundColor(LIGHT_GRAY)
            .withFont(HELVETICA_BOLD_OBLIQUE)
            .setHorizontalAlignment(RIGHT)
            .withAllBorders())
        .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:

mvn clean install

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

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.vandeseer.pdfbox</groupId>
    <artifactId>easytable</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.10</version>
</dependency>

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

Kudos

Thanks @Binghammer for implementing cell coloring and text center alignment!

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.