Styles: iText 5 versus iText 7

Remarks#

Creating a document in which you have to switch between styles frequently tends to be tedious in iText 5. You need to create a lot of Chunk objects and you always have to make a trade-off between applying the styles directly to every new Chunk or creating a helper method that creates the Chunk for you.

What we fixed in iText 7:

It is now possible to chain methods. The setFont(), setFontSize(), addStyle(), and other methods all return the object on which they are invoked. Adding a Paragraph involving different styles can now be done in one line:

document.add(
    new Paragraph()
        .add("In this example, named ")
        .add(new Text("HelloWorldStyles").addStyle(style))
        .add(", we experiment with some text in ")
        .add(new Text("code style").addStyle(style))
        .add("."));

Using the Style object, you can now also apply different properties (font, font color, background color, font size,…) in one go with the addStyle() method.

Want to know more?

Read Introducing the PdfFont class which is chapter 1 in the iText 7: Building Blocks tutorial. Get the free ebook!

HelloWorldStyles.java (iText 5)

In this iText 5 example, we need to switch between different styles in the same document:

The best way to do this in iText 5, is to create a convenience method that creates a Chunk in the style that needs to be used frequently; see the createBgChunk() method:

public Chunk createBgChunk(String s, Font font) {
    Chunk chunk = new Chunk(s, font);
    chunk.setBackground(BaseColor.LIGHT_GRAY);
    return chunk;
}

We can now use this method in the code that creates the PDF:

public void createPdf(String dest)
throws DocumentException, IOException {
    Document document = new Document();
    PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream(dest));
    document.open();
    Font code = new Font(FontFamily.COURIER, 12, Font.NORMAL, BaseColor.RED);
    Paragraph p = new Paragraph("In this example, named ");
    p.add(createBgChunk("HelloWorldStyles", code));
    p.add(", we experiment with some text in ");
    p.add(createBgChunk("code style", code));
    p.add(".");
    document.add(p);
    document.close();
}

Source: developers.itextpdf.com

HelloWorldStyles.java (iText 7)

In this iText 7 example, we need to switch between different styles in the same document:

The best way to achieve this in iText 7, is to create a Style object, and to apply that Style to a Text object:

public void createPdf(String dest) throws IOException {
    PdfDocument pdf = new PdfDocument(new PdfWriter(dest));
    PdfFont code = PdfFontFactory.createFont(FontConstants.COURIER);
    Style style = new Style()
        .setFont(code)
        .setFontSize(12)
        .setFontColor(Color.RED)
        .setBackgroundColor(Color.LIGHT_GRAY);
    try (Document document = new Document(pdf)) {
        document.add(
            new Paragraph()
                .add("In this example, named ")
                .add(new Text("HelloWorldStyles").addStyle(style))
                .add(", we experiment with some text in ")
                .add(new Text("code style").addStyle(style))
                .add("."));
    }
}

Source: developers.itextpdf.com and the iText 7: Building Blocks tutorial.