How to add PDFBox to an Android project or suggest alternative

Question

I'm attempting to open an existing pdf file and then add another page to the pdf document from within an Android application. On the added page, I need to add some text and an image.

I am wanting to give PDFBox a try. Other solutions such as iTextPDF aren't suitable for our company because of the licencing terms/price.

I have a library project with the main code base, and also full and lite projects that reference the library project.

I have downloaded the jar from http://pdfbox.apache.org/download.html and copied it into the library projects lib folder and added the pdfbox-app-1.6.0.jar file to the java build path libraries.

I am able to import the librarys successfully eg import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument; and compile all the projects. However when I run the application it crashes on PDDocument document = new PDDocument(); with the following error.

E/AndroidRuntime(24451): java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument

I read somewhere that version 1.5 of PDFBox onwards didn't work with Android so I tried downloading the pdfbox-app-1.4.0.jar file but got the same issue. I also added the library to the build path in my full and lite projects but I got the same error or eclipse kept crashing with an out of memory error.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong? Have I downloaded the wrong file? Have I imported it correctly?

Thanks,

Solution 1

PDFBox uses java awt and swing, even for non UI tasks, I've tried to remove references but there are a lot of files, and I was removing too much stuff

I've just tested PDFjet http://pdfjet.com/os/edition.html it's bsd licensed (plus commercial version with more features), with this sample code (ripped from Example_03.java) I was able to convert a jpeg to a pdf

    FileOutputStream fos = null;
    try
    {
        fos = new FileOutputStream("/sdcard/sample.pdf");
        PDF pdf = new PDF(fos);
        InputStream f = getApplicationContext().getAssets().open("img0.jpg"); 
        Image image = new Image(pdf, f, ImageType.JPEG);
        Page page = new Page(pdf, A4.PORTRAIT);
        image.setPosition(0, 0);
        image.drawOn(page);
        pdf.flush();
        fos.close();
    } catch (Exception e)
    {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

I found the link here http://java-source.net/open-source/pdf-libraries

Solution 2

Android Port of PDFBox

There's a free Android Port of PDFBox available here:

https://github.com/TomRoush/PdfBox-Android

Comments

[Dittimon]

Thanks for the response. Do I need to convert the jar file to a dex file?

[sateesh]

yes or the classes files need to be convert to dex files while compiling.

[Sdr]

Please let me know if you are aware of any examples which achieve the reverse i.e. PDF->Image using PDFJet. I've gone through most of the examples.All of them seem to be passing an instance of new FileOutputStream to the PDF() constructor method, which I believe is suggestive of the fact that we are trying to create a new PDF. Instead what I seek is the ability to read/parse an existing pdf. Thanks.

[Chirag Shah]

@sherpya how to integrate PDFjet into android project?

[sherpya]

I did it some time ago, but I think you can just put the .jar in the lib subdirectory of the project

[Roman Soviak]

This lib is very restricted