Damien Drix wrote: > Hello, > > In my application, I needed greater control over the rendering of text > than the standard high-level iText API allows. For example, I had to > support several line spacing modes, text wrapping around an arbitrary > shape, etc.
You can go a long way with ColumnText and/or PdfContentByte. Only text wrapping around a shape is not possible (you can have irregular columns, but you can't put an image in the middle of a big chunk of text). > To this end, I've been using low-level text processing classes such as > BidiLine, PdfLine and PdfChunk (and also, > PdfDocument.writeLineToContent()). As some of the required methods were > protected or package-private, I had to declare one of my paragraph > rendering classes as part of the com.lowagie.text.pdf package (luckily, > the iText jar is not sealed). That's fine if you know what you are doing (and apparently you know), but I wouldn't advice first-time users to open up classes like BidiLine, PdfLine and PdfChunk ;-) > It works perfectly well, but one is always a bit reluctant to use > non-public members, and I think the low-level iText API would benefit > from the text processing tools being made public. > Do you think that could be done in a future release? This part of the > code seems to be already quite mature and of API-grade quality, so it > could be a simple matter of changing access permissions. Of course, this > is not at all an urgent request, just a suggestion ;) I'm not sure if opening up the API would be a good thing, especially if we don't provide good documentation (I wrote an 'Under the hood' chapter for the book, but it didn't discuss the classes you mention). My main problem isn't of a technical nature. It's just that there are plenty of newbies out there and when they find an example (any example) or a class (for instance PdfTable, not PdfPTable), they fiddle with it the wrong way. Afterwards they complain on the mailing list that it doesn't work (or even worse: to me personally). If we open up classes like PdfLine, this risk gets higher. But maybe I'm just being too pessimistic about it... I'm not against it; it's a good suggestion, but I would like to hear why ColumnText wasn't sufficient for your needs, and of course I also want to hear what Paulo thinks about it. best regards, Bruno ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ iText-questions mailing list iText-questions@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/itext-questions
