iText in Action, Second Edition

Chapter 3. Adding content at absolute positions

This chapter covers

• Low-level access to page content, aka direct content
• Convenience methods for writing direct content
• Using the ColumnText object
• Reusing content with the PdfTemplate object

In chapter 1, you learned that there are different ways to add content to a document when generating a PDF file from scratch. In chapter 2, you learned to add high-level objects to a Document. Now you’re going to learn an approach that’s totally different: you’ll add content to a page using methods that are referred to as low-level operations because they write PDF syntax directly to the content stream of the page.

A complete overview of the PDF operators and operands will follow in chapter 14. This chapter ...