Posted by : Unknown Saturday, November 5, 2011

I was just looking for some way to merge PDFs generated from different sources to one final deck. iText library was one obvious choice but when I looked into PDFBox library I was stunned with the simplicity and ease with which PDFs can be merged. I tried merging three different PDF files and to my surprise it took less than 15 lines of code as shown below:



package com.gognamunish.test;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import org.apache.pdfbox.util.PDFMergerUtility;

/**
 * Merges pdf files into one final pdf.
 * 
 * @author Munish Gogna
 */
public class PDFMerge {

 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
  // Get the byte streams from any source (maintain order)
  List<InputStream> sourcePDFs = new ArrayList<InputStream>();
  sourcePDFs.add(new FileInputStream(new File("pdf1.pdf")));
  sourcePDFs.add(new FileInputStream(new File("pdf2.pdf")));
  sourcePDFs.add(new FileInputStream(new File("pdf3.pdf")));

  // initialize the Merger utility and add pdfs to be merged
  PDFMergerUtility mergerUtility = new PDFMergerUtility();
  mergerUtility.addSources(sourcePDFs);
  // set the destination pdf name and merge input pdfs
  mergerUtility.setDestinationFileName("merged.pdf");
  mergerUtility.mergeDocuments();
 }
}

The library is rich and provides many options out of the box that can be useful when it comes to playing with PDFs, worth a try !!!

http://pdfbox.apache.org/index.html
 cheers, Munish Gogna

{ 3 comments... read them below or Comment }

  1. Hello,

    The file input streams added to the sources list are not closed!! Might cause memory leaks?

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  2. soulless being, You are right they would cause memory leak, but the idea is just to highlight the merging capability of the library and nothing else.

    ReplyDelete

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