FOP has options to create PDF files and to send output directly to the printer. If those are working for you, I'm not sure why you might need PDFBox. I use the PDFBox project because FOP sending output directly to the printer didn't work for me. In one case it went to the wrong printer. In another case it went to the wrong tray. I used the FOP option to send the output to a ByteArrayOutputStream instead, read the data from that stream into a ByteArrayInputStream which works as input for PDFBox which creates a Pageable object, which I was able to pass in to the Java print methods which gave me more control over the output. The PDFBox object can be saved as a PDF file, but the FOP ByteArrayOutputStream can also be redirected to a FileOutputStream to save directly. I'm not sure what advantage PDFBox might have there. One possible advantage would be to have the output saved in a Pageable reuseable object if perhaps you want to send the same report to 2 different printers.
________________________________ From: Steffanina, Jeff [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 9:19 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Using PDFBox I saw some references to Apache PDFBox and took a look at it. I currently use FOP / XSLT, etc to generate printed documents. Is there some specific feature(s) of PDFBox that I should take a closer look at??? Jeff
