Creating tables with PDFBox

Apache PDFBox is a useful Java library for working with PDF documents. It allows you to create new PDF documents and extract data from existing documents.

However, the library doesn't provide an API for creating tables within PDF documents. So I wrote my own method which uses basic operations like drawLine to draw the table cells and drawString to fill in the content. The code is shown below. Note, that this code could be improved to handle longer strings of text properly by wrapping text within cells, which it doesn't do at present.

/**
 * @param page
 * @param contentStream
 * @param y the y-coordinate of the first row
 * @param margin the padding on left and right of table
 * @param content a 2d array containing the table data
 * @throws IOException
 */
public static void drawTable(PDPage page, PDPageContentStream contentStream,
                            float y, float margin,
                            String[][] content) throws IOException {
    final int rows = content.length;
    final int cols = content[0].length;
    final float rowHeight = 20f;
    final float tableWidth = page.findMediaBox().getWidth()-(2*margin);
    final float tableHeight = rowHeight * rows;
    final float colWidth = tableWidth/(float)cols;
    final float cellMargin=5f;

    //draw the rows
    float nexty = y ;
    for (int i = 0; i <= rows; i++) {
        contentStream.drawLine(margin,nexty,margin+tableWidth,nexty);
        nexty-= rowHeight;
    }

    //draw the columns
    float nextx = margin;
    for (int i = 0; i <= cols; i++) {
        contentStream.drawLine(nextx,y,nextx,y-tableHeight);
        nextx += colWidth;
    }

    //now add the text
    contentStream.setFont(PDType1Font.HELVETICA_BOLD,12);

    float textx = margin+cellMargin;
    float texty = y-15;
    for(int i = 0; i < content.length; i++){
        for(int j = 0 ; j < content[i].length; j++){
            String text = content[i][j];
            contentStream.beginText();
            contentStream.moveTextPositionByAmount(textx,texty);
            contentStream.drawString(text);
            contentStream.endText();
            textx += colWidth;
        }
        texty-=rowHeight;
        textx = margin+cellMargin;
    }
}

public static void main(String[] args){
    PDDocument doc = new PDDocument();
    PDPage page = new PDPage();
    doc.addPage( page );

    PDPageContentStream contentStream =
                    new PDPageContentStream(doc, page);

    String[][] content = {{"a","b", "1"},
                          {"c","d", "2"},
                          {"e","f", "3"},
                          {"g","h", "4"},
                          {"i","j", "5"}} ;

    drawTable(page, contentStream, 700, 100, content);
    contentStream.close();
    doc.save("test.pdf" );
    }