OpenPdf/PdfBox automatically generate table of contents

Question

In my current java/springboot project, I need to create a PDF dynamicaly containing paragraphs, images and tables. And I also need to add the table of content of this document.

I'm wondering if there is a way to automatically generate this table of contents using either openPdf or pdfBox.

I noticed that it is possible to do so using IText, but it is not free...

Thanks in advance for your help.

You can integrate jasper report for your requirement. It is free — Rajesh Patel, May 09 '22 at 12:37
Hi @RajeshPatel, thanks for your quick answer, can you tell me more about jasper ? — David ROSEY, May 09 '22 at 12:45
JasperReports is LGPL and iText is AGPL (if that means free or not free for either of them, it will entirely depend on whether you need a commercial license, or can operate under the opensource license terms) — André Lemos, May 09 '22 at 13:01
Ps.: iText provides an example on [how to use events to do it](https://kb.itextpdf.com/home/it7kb/examples/creating-table-of-contents-using-events) — André Lemos, May 09 '22 at 15:21

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 09 '22 at 19:42

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You can use OpenPDF for this: https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF

Also see Flying Saucer: https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer

answered May 09 '22 at 19:42

roschdal

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1
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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 10 '22 at 13:22

Actually neither openPdf nor pdfBox provide a way to automatically generate table of contents :-(

iText provide us with such functionality, but it is under AGPL licence so cannot be used in my case...

For the time being, I will try acheive my needs using apache POI then convert the generated docx to pdf using opensagres/xdocreport (see: Trying to make simple PDF document with Apache poi)

OpenPdf/PdfBox automatically generate table of contents

2 Answers2