How to create PDFs in an Android app

Question

Is there any way to create PDF Files from an Android application

User · Answer

A trick to make a PDF with complex features is to make a dummy activity with the desired xml layout  You can then open this dummy activity  take a screenshot programmatically and convert that image to pdf using this library  Of course there are limitations such as not being able to scroll  not more than one page but for a limited application this is quick and easy  Hope this helps someone

User · Answer

It s not easy to find a full solution of the problem of a convertion of an arbitrary HTML to PDF with non-english letters in Android  I test it for russian unicode letters    We use three libraries     1  Jsoup  jsoup-1 7 3 jar  for a convertion from HTML to XHTML     2  iTextPDF  itextpdf-5 5 0 jar     3  XMLWorker  xmlworker-5 5 1 jar    public boolean createPDF String rawHTML  String fileName  ContextWrapper context       final String APPLICATION PACKAGE NAME   context getBaseContext   getPackageName        File path   new File  Environment getExternalStorageDirectory    APPLICATION PACKAGE NAME        if    path exists      path mkdir          File file   new File path  fileName        try       Document document   new Document        PdfWriter writer   PdfWriter getInstance document  new FileOutputStream file        document open                           HTML     String htmlText   Jsoup clean  rawHTML  Whitelist relaxed          InputStream inputStream   new ByteArrayInputStream  htmlText getBytes                                PDF     XMLWorkerHelper getInstance   parseXHtml writer  document          inputStream  null  Charset defaultCharset    new MyFont          document close        return true         catch  FileNotFoundException e            e printStackTrace            return false        catch  DocumentException e            e printStackTrace            return false        catch  IOException e            e printStackTrace            return false           The difficult problem is to display russian letters in PDF by using iTextPDF XMLWorker library  For this we should create our own implementation of FontProvider interface   public class MyFont implements FontProvider      private static final String FONT PATH     system fonts DroidSans ttf       private static final String FONT ALIAS    my font        public MyFont    FontFactory register FONT PATH  FONT ALIAS           Override     public Font getFont String fontname  String encoding  boolean embedded          float size  int style  BaseColor color            return FontFactory getFont FONT ALIAS  BaseFont IDENTITY H               BaseFont EMBEDDED  size  style  color               Override     public boolean isRegistered String name    return name equals  FONT ALIAS          Here we use the standard Android font Droid Sans  which is located in the system folder   private static final String FONT PATH     system fonts DroidSans ttf

User · Answer

A bit late and I have not yet tested it yet myself but another library that is under the BSD  license is Android PDF Writer   Update I have tried the library myself  Works ok with simple pdf generations  it provide methods for adding text  lines  rectangles  bitmaps  fonts   The only problem is that the generated PDF is stored in a String in memory  this may cause memory issues in large documents

User · Answer

U can also use PoDoFo library  The main goal is that it published under LGPL  Since it is written in C   you should cross-compile it using NDK and write C-side and Java wrapper  Some of third-party libraries can be used from OpenCV project  Also in OpenCV project U can find android toolchain cmake file  which will help you with generating Makefile

User · Answer

If anyone wants to generate PDFs on Android device  here is how to do it    http   sourceforge net projects itext   library  http   www vogella de articles JavaPDF article html  tutorial  http   tutorials jenkov com java-itext image html  images tutorial

User · Answer

If you are developing for devices with API level 19 or higher you can use the built in PrintedPdfDocument  http   developer android com reference android print pdf PrintedPdfDocument html     open a new document PrintedPdfDocument document   new PrintedPdfDocument context       printAttributes       start a page Page page   document startPage 0       draw something on the page View content   getContentView    content draw page getCanvas         finish the page document finishPage page            add more pages          write the document content document writeTo getOutputStream        close the document document close

User · Answer

Late  but relevant to request and hopefully helpful   If using an external service  as suggested in the reply by CommonsWare  then Docmosis has a cloud service that might help - offloading processing to a cloud service that does the heavy processing   That approach is ideal in some circumstances but of course relies on being net-connected

User · Answer

PDFJet offers an open-source version of their library that should be able to handle any basic PDF generation task  It s a purely Java-based solution and it is stated to be compatible with Android  There is a commercial version with some additional features that does not appear to be too expensive

[android] How to create PDFs in an Android app?

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