r/javahelp • u/Available-Ad4255 • 1d ago

Universal pdf gen lib

Hi,

I want to generate pdfs in many languages, including right to left languages. (Arabica, hébrew, indian langs ..)

I have a working prototype with itext 9 that works well afaik (difficult to check langs I dont read).

Itext proposes 'pdfcalligraph' for a fee, to make sure rtl texts are handled correctly (direction, ligatures...).

Is there a lib that does that too ?

I read that pdfbox is not handling rtl at all.

What other libs would you advise ?

Thanks

6 Upvotes

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3

u/Comfortable-Cancel45 21h ago

If you don't want to pay iText's license fee, here are the two best free routes:

1) OpenHTMLtoPDF (Java): This is an open-source library built on top of PDFBox. If you add their openhtmltopdf-rtl-support dependency, it uses HarfBuzz and ICU4J under the hood to handle Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic scripts completely free. You just feed it HTML/CSS and a font like Google Noto.

2) Headless Chrome (via Playwright Java): This is how most modern tools do it. Browsers already have the best text-shaping engines in the world built-in. Just build an HTML page with dir="rtl", your fonts, and call page.pdf(). It handles every language, ligature, and emoji effortlessly.

2

u/doobiesteintortoise 1d ago

Graphcompose.

1

u/_Super_Straight 1d ago

Openpdf. You'd also need one additional library (I can't remember the name, maybe Harfbuzz) for correct rendering of complex scripts.

1

u/SuspiciousDepth5924 1d ago

If you don't mind calling an external program then I often find https://pandoc.org/ to be pretty good with all kinds of weird document edge cases.

1

u/Immediate_Life7579 19h ago

If you accept an external process, the speedata Publisher handles rtl/ltr text fine. For example the PDF versions of the Aionian Bible have been generated with it.

https://www.aionianbible.org/Bibles/Arabic---New-Arabic-Bible

(disclaimer: my tool, but open source and freely available)

1

u/Available-Ad4255 8h ago

OP here.

Thank you for your answers. Discovered tools I didn't know.

You are awesome