Create a PDF file from HTML specified via URL

Question

I would like to generate a PDF and Image file from HTML specified via URL(page) and send it to an external system. I need to perform this generation logic in java. The most popular and widely used libraries for generating PDFs from HTML are Apache PDFBox and iText. But is there any tool available to generate PDF and image based on the page URL?

Answer 1

You can use Flying Saucer: Flying Saucer is a Java library that can convert XHTML and HTML documents to PDF and images. It can render web pages, including external resources, and convert them into PDFs or images.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer

Here's a basic example using Flying Saucer to convert HTML to a PDF in Java:

import org.xhtmlrenderer.pdf.ITextRenderer;

public class HtmlToPdfConverter {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String url = "http://example.com"; // Replace with your desired URL
        String outputPdfFile = "output.pdf";

        // Create an ITextRenderer instance
        ITextRenderer renderer = new ITextRenderer();

        // Set the URL to be converted
        renderer.setDocument(url);

        // Perform the layout and render to PDF
        renderer.layout();
        renderer.createPDF(outputPdfFile);

        // Close the renderer
        renderer.finishPDF();
    }
}

Please note that you'll need to handle exceptions, configure options, and adapt the code to your specific requirements, such as adding error handling, specifying output paths, and adjusting rendering settings.

edit To generate image you can refer below code snippet

import org.xhtmlrenderer.simple.Graphics2DRenderer;
import java.awt.image.BufferedImage;
import java.io.File;
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;

public class HtmlToImageConverter {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String url = "http://example.com"; // Replace with your desired URL
        String outputImageFile = "output.png";

        // Create a Graphics2DRenderer instance
        Graphics2DRenderer renderer = new Graphics2DRenderer();

        // Set the URL to be converted
        renderer.setDocument(url);

        // Perform layout
        renderer.layout();

        // Create a BufferedImage
        BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(renderer.getWidth(),
                                                  renderer.getHeight(),
                                                  BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);

        // Render HTML content to the BufferedImage
        renderer.createPDF(image.createGraphics(), false);

        // Save the BufferedImage as an image file
        File outputFile = new File(outputImageFile);
        ImageIO.write(image, "png", outputFile);

        System.out.println("Image saved to: " + outputFile.getAbsolutePath());
    }
}