Chapters

Chapter 1

Introducing PDF and iText
Chapter 2

Using iText's basic building blocks
Chapter 3

Adding content at absolute positions
Chapter 4

Organizing content in tables
Chapter 5

Table, cell, and page events
Chapter 6

Working with existing PDFs
Chapter 7

Making documents interactive
Chapter 8

Filling out interactive forms
Chapter 9

Integrating iText in your web applications
Chapter 10

Brightening up your PDF with color and images
Chapter 11

Choosing the right font
Chapter 12

Protecting your PDF
Chapter 13

PDFs inside-out
Chapter 14

The imaging model
Chapter 15

Page content and structure
Chapter 16

PDF streams

Appendix

Appendix A

Bibliography
Appendix B

Useful links

Chapter 3:
Adding content at absolute positions

< Chapter 2: Using iText's basic building blocks Chapter 4: Organizing content in tables >

Chapter 3 of the book iText in Action 2E covers:

Low-level access to page content, aka direct content
Convenience methods to write direct content
Using the ColumnText object
Reusing content with the PdfTemplate object

This chapter describes how to write PDF syntax directly to the content stream of the page. It covers the basics, but quickly moves on to convenience methods that hide some of the complexity of PDF. It also discusses the ColumnText object, an object that allows you to add basic building blocks at absolute positions.

3.1: Introducing the concept of direct content
- 3.1.1: Direct content layers
- 3.1.2: Graphics state and text state
- 3.1.3: A real-world database: three more tables
3.2: Adding text at absolute positions
- 3.2.1: Convenience method: PdfContentByte.showTextAligned()
- 3.2.2: Convenience method: ColumnText.showTextAligned()
3.3: Working with the ColumnText object
- 3.3.1: Using ColumnText in text mode
- 3.3.2: Using ColumnText in composite mode
3.4: Creating reusable content
- 3.4.1: Image XObjects
- 3.4.2: The PdfTemplate object
3.5: Summary

Consult the full table of contents, take a look at the illustrations from this chapter, or try out some of the examples:

Figures

Figure 3.1: Adding content using low-level methods to a page created with high-level objects
Figure 3.2: The four content layers: 2 and 3 for the high-level objects; 1 and 4 for direct content
Figure 3.3: Repeating the same rectangle using different graphics states
Figure 3.4: Festival database entity relationship diagram
Figure 3.5: Film festival timetable
Figure 3.6: Timetable with movie time blocks
Figure 3.7: Measuring and positioning text: width, ascent and descent of a String
Figure 3.8: Adding text with ColumnText.showTextAligned()
Figure 3.9: Timetable without movie titles
Figure 3.10: The finished timetable, now with the movie titles
Figure 3.11: Movie information, organized in columns
Figure 3.12: Irregular columns
Figure 3.13: Columns in composite mode
Figure 3.14: Alignment in composite mode
Figure 3.15: Image covering text
Figure 3.16: Skewing an image
Figure 3.17: Mimicking strips of film using PdfTemplate
Figure 3.18: Adding the same PdfTemplate object using different transformations

Chapter 3:Adding content at absolute positions

Figures

Examples

Chapter 3:
Adding content at absolute positions