PDFjet for Java: professional PDFs at jet speed.

One small JAR. No dependencies. Royalty-free. Everything you need to turn your data into documents your users will love — generated in milliseconds, and written out page by page as you go, so even the biggest reports need remarkably little memory.

Tables and reports

Table flows across as many pages as it needs and repeats its header rows on each one
Cells hold text, images, barcodes, charts — even other tables
Merged cells, colors, borders, padding and alignment, cell by cell
BigTable draws reports of any length, straight from a file or from your own data, with flat memory
Choose and order the columns, shade alternate rows, customize the footer
"Page X of N" footers on every page
Reads comma, pipe and tab separated data, quoted fields included

Text and typography

TextBlock wraps text to a width, aligns it and fits it to a height
TextColumn sets justified paragraphs that mix fonts, sizes and colors
TextFrame flows long text from column to column and page to page
Markdown to PDF: headings, lists, tables and links, tagged in a PDF/UA document
Highlight keywords in color, underline, strike out, rotate
Subscripts and superscripts, such as H₂O and E=mc²

Fonts and languages

Unicode everywhere
A rich set of ready-to-use fonts, pre-compressed so they embed in an instant
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai
Right-to-left Arabic, Hebrew and Persian, with letters joined and marks placed
Monospaced, math and symbol fonts for code, formulas and icons
Use any OpenType or TrueType font of your own

Charts and calendars

Scatter charts with trend lines
Bar charts: horizontal or vertical, grouped or stacked
Donut charts
Monthly calendars

Graphics

Lines, rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, ellipses and arcs
Polygons, Bézier curves and complex paths
Stars, arrows, diamonds and more markers
Transparency, dashed lines, line caps and joins
Rotate, scale and group content with Container
Stamp headers, footers and watermarks: stored once, placed on every page, files stay small
Layers your readers can show or hide
Printed forms: labeled fields, check boxes and radio buttons, ready to fill in by hand

Images

PNG in every color type and bit depth, with transparency
JPEG and BMP
SVG, drawn as crisp vector graphics at any zoom

Barcodes

UPC-A, EAN-13, Code 39 and Code 128
QR Code, Data Matrix and PDF417
Drawn as vector graphics — no barcode fonts to buy or license

Interactive documents

Hyperlinks on text, images and shapes
Links to any place in the document
Nested, automatically numbered bookmarks
File attachments and annotations

Accessible and archival

PDF/UA-1 tagged documents for screen readers, in one setting; you write the image descriptions
PDF/A-1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a and 3b for long-term archiving, in one setting

Security

AES-256 encryption with user and owner passwords
Permissions: allow or deny printing, copying, editing and more
Opens encrypted documents too

Your existing PDFs

Open a PDF and add to its pages: fill in a form, stamp a watermark
Merge documents into one, with your own cover page in front
Split a document into single pages or any selection of pages
Reuse a page of another PDF, such as your logo

Built for production

Writes to any output stream: files, web responses, cloud storage
Catches mistakes in your code with a clear message instead of writing a broken PDF
Hardened against malformed and malicious input
A fluent API: chain your calls
Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Executive, A3, A4, A5, B5 and JIS B5 pages, or any size you like
50 ready-to-run examples, each with the PDF it creates

How fast?

We timed PDFjet for Java against Apache PDFBox, iText and OpenPDF on five everyday documents: an invoice, a 12-page statement, an 18-page report with photos, a notice in eight languages, and a batch of 1,000 letters.

With IBM Plex Sans, PDFjet was the fastest of the four on every document.
A fresh process makes its first PDF with PDFjet in 38 to 86 ms; the others take 127 to 540 ms. That matters for command-line tools and serverless functions.
PDFBox makes the smallest files, and with the larger Noto Sans font it was the fastest on three of the five documents.

The full report, with every chart, the features of each library, and the code to run it yourself: Generating PDFs in Java: four libraries compared.

Requirements: Java 8 or later.