Eden Ridgway's Blog

The iTextSharp's current XML to PDF example is clearly out of date and does not work. So I went about fixing the example. You can download it here: iTextSharpExample.zip.

The generation of a PDF file from XML is surprisingly painless. The steps are as follows:

1. Create an iTextSharp document
   Document document = new Document();
2. Get an instance of the PDF writer and at the same time specify the output PDF
   PdfWriter.GetInstance(document, new FileStream("ExampleDoc.pdf", FileMode.Create));
3. Create an iTextSharp Xml TextHandler passing in the document instance
   ITextHandler xmlHandler = new ITextHandler(document);
4. Get the TextHandler object to parse the XML file that has the iTextSharp XML elements
   xmlHandler.Parse("ExampleDoc.xml");

Of course there's more to this because the XML document must be in a format that iTextSharp can use. Everything is in the itext.dtd file in the example, but here is a summary:

• The outermost element is itext and one can have title, subject, keywords and author attributes
• Within that you can have one of the following elements:
  • chunk - a small piece of text - useful if you want to set the colour or background of the text
  • phrase - a collection of chunks and allows you to define the space between lines
  • paragraph - a collection of chunks/phrases with a carriage return after them
• The list and listitem element is used to add lists
• You can add images to paragraphs, listitem and several other elements using the image element and url attribute
• Tables are controlled through table, row and cell elements

Here is an example XML file:
This is what the pdf file generated using the xml above looks like: iTextXmlToPdf Example.pdf