Generating header/footer with flying saucer (xHTMLRenderer) and iText

I realize this question has been asked before (I looked at all the solutions and tried them all) but I am still trying to generate a pdf document with a header and footer that repeat on every page.

I am using flying saucer R8 with iText2.0.8 I have tried many different methods to get it working but so far to no avail. Some methods I tested out were https://gist.github.com/626264, using running elements and margin boxs http://pigeonholdings.com/projects/flyingsaucer/R8/doc/guide/users-guide-R8.html#xil_40 (css3 feature), a guide for flying saucer r7 that doesn't work for r8 http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/06/26/generating-pdfs-with-flying-saucer-and-itext.html#page-specific-features, a long with many other methods which did not work for me.

My header div contains 2 other divs with images and my footer is just for page numbering. The html is being put into a StringBuffer called buf.

buf.append("<head>");
    buf.append("<title>blabla</title> ");
    buf.append("<style type='text/css' media='print'>  ");
    buf.append("@page { size:8.5in 11in; padding:1em; @bottom-left { content: element(footer); } } ");
    buf.append("#footer { font-size: 90%; font-style: italic;  position: running(footer); top: 0; left: 0; }");
    buf.append("#pagenumber:before { content: counter(page); } ");
    buf.append("#pagecount:before { content: counter(pages); } ");
buf.append("</style></head>");
buf.append("<body>");
 buf.append("<div class='header' style='clear:both;'>");
    buf.append("<div id='moneyLogo' style='float:left'>"); 
    buf.append("<img src='logo.jpg' alt='Some alt text' />");
    buf.append("</div>");
    buf.append("<div id='canLogo' style='float:right'>");
    buf.append("<img src='someImg.gif' alt='alt text' />");
    buf.append("</div>");
    buf.append("<h3 style='text-align:center; clear:both;'>alt text</h3>");
    buf.append("<div style='text-align:center;'>");
    buf.append("Some texy text");
    buf.append("<br />"););
    buf.append("</div>");
    buf.append("</div><br /><br />");
buf.append("<div id='footer'>  Page <span id='pagenumber'/> of <span id='pagecount'/> </div>");

    buf.append("</body>");
    buf.append("</html>");

My pdf generates fine except for the fact that the header only appears on the first page and the footer only appears on the bottom of the last page. When I put the html through the w3c validator it came out fine, but when I used their CSS validator it said that their were parse errors in the line @page { size:8.5in 11in; padding:1em; @bottom-left { content: element(footer); } }

As far as I could tell from all the guides I was reading this was fine. I also heard that the W3C CSS validator was incomplete for CSS3 specs so I assumed it was the validator who was wrong.

If anyone could give me some tips of where to look or ideas it would make my week :)

p.s. Has to use Flying saucer R8 and/or iText 2.0.8

Solution

Here is a working example:

package com.sg2net.test;

import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;

import org.xhtmlrenderer.pdf.ITextRenderer;

import com.lowagie.text.DocumentException;

public class XHTMLRenderer8 {

    /**
     * @author Giovanni Cuccu
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException, DocumentException {
        ITextRenderer renderer = new ITextRenderer();
        String content="<html><head><style>\n" +
          "div.header {\n" +
          "display: block; text-align: center;\n" + 
          "position: running(header);}\n" +
          "div.footer {\n" +
          "display: block; text-align: center;\n" + 
          "position: running(footer);}\n" +
          "div.content {page-break-after: always;}" +
          "@page { @top-center { content: element(header) }}\n " +
          "@page { @bottom-center { content: element(footer) }}\n" +
          "</style></head>\n" +
          "<body><div class='header'>Header</div><div class='footer'>Footer</div><div class='content'>Page1</div><div>Page2</div></body></html>";
        renderer.setDocumentFromString(content);
        renderer.layout();
        renderer.createPDF(new FileOutputStream("test.pdf"));

    }

}

This is using the following XHTML document

<html>
<head>
<style>
div.header {
    display: block; text-align: center; 
    position: running(header);
}
div.footer {
    display: block; text-align: center;
    position: running(footer);
}
div.content {page-break-after: always;}
@page {
     @top-center { content: element(header) }
}
@page { 
    @bottom-center { content: element(footer) }
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
    <div class='header'>Header</div>
    <div class='footer'>Footer</div>
    <div class='content'>Page1</div>
    <div>Page2</div>
</body>
</html>