Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

In my blog post the future of iText^®, I already gave a preview of upcoming development. In the meantime, we've started selling licenses for an "iText light for Android". That's a trimmed down version of the iText jar that can be used on Android smart phones and Tablet PCs. We've also implemented Adobe's Geospatial dictionaries (and we still need people to test it).

But our first master project was a complete rewrite of the HTMLWorker functionality. A while ago, we published an Invoice Demo, today, we're proud to announce our XMLWorker demo:

The central part of the page shown in the above screen shot, consists of an editor component. We've chosen TinyMCE, but the demo would also have worked with CKEditor. These are (probably) the most popular JavaScript editors used in web applications to create styled text, for instance, to write a blog post in a content management system.

In the above screen shot, I've written the sentence "quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" using different styles. Please try for yourself, type some text, change its style, fill out the captcha field, and hit the transform button. In my case, I received the following PDF file as result:

If you take a closer look at the TinyMCE component, you'll notice that you can ask the editor for the HTML source code of the page:

As you can see, I've introduced a tables with colspan, rowspan, different colors, etc... Please check the XMLWorker documentation to find out which tags and styles are supported. Note that external CSS will be supported in the next iText version, but it's not available in the demo.

Let's take a look at how iText rendered the source shown in the previous screen shot to PDF:

If the result doesn't correspond with the HTML (or with the expected result), please let us know using the feedback form:

Balder Van Camp and Emiel Ackermann, who wrote the new HTMLWorker, will use your feedback to improve the source code. For the moment, we're only making the source code available to our existing customers. So if you're a customer, please send a mail to the address that was provided when you purchased a license. If you're not a customer, watch this blog or watch the mailing list! We'll announce iText 5.1 as soon as it's ready.

P.S. Why is the demo called XMLWorker demo instead of HTMLWorker demo? The ultimate goal is to be able to convert any type of XML to PDF. We've started with HTML because we're very familiar with HTML and because many iText users were asking for a better HTMLWorker, but basically, the type of XML doesn't matter. We have a consultancy department that is eager to take on many other XML schemas. So if you're looking for XML to PDF conversion, contact us, and we'll make you an offer!