JasperReports PDF Exporter Lib Seven

This project contains a PDF producer implementation for the JasperReports Library based on iText version 7.

The JasperReports Library uses a built-in PDF producer based on iText version 2.1.7. Starting with iText version 5, the iText library has changed its license from LGPL/MPL to AGPL, and also changed its package names, therefore the JasperReports Library built-in PDF producer does not work with iText versions newer than 2.1.7.

This separate project was created to allow the JasperReports PDF exporter to use iText 7 as PDF producer. The project is released under AGPL so that it is compatible with the iText 7 license and thus continue to be available for use in open source products.

How to use

The iText 7 PDF producer can be plugged into the standard JasperReports PDF exporter by adding the required jars and setting a configuration property in jasperreports.properties.

The configuration property that needs to be set is:

net.sf.jasperreports.export.pdf.producer.factory=com.jaspersoft.jasperreports.export.pdf.modern.ModernPdfProducerFactory

The following jars need to present on the classpath:

• jasperreports-pdf-lib7-{x.y.z}.jar (published by this project)
• iText 7 jars:
  • kernel-7.{x.y}.jar
  • io-7.{x.y}.jar
  • layout-7.{x.y}.jar
  • pdfa-7.{x.y}.jar
  • forms-7.{x.y}.jar
  • svg-7.{x.y}.jar
  • styled-xml-parser-7.{x.y}.jar
• Third party jars:
  • slf4j-api-1.{x.y}.jar
  • Apache Batik jars
  • serializer-2.7.2.jar (part of the Apache Xalan project)

Note that iText 2.1.7 still needs to be present on the classpath due to some dependencies from JasperReports Library code.

Drawbacks

iText 7 contains several parts that have been rewritten, removed or significantly modified since iText 2 and 5. Due to these changes the JasperReports Library cannot create PDF output identical to the one produced with iText 2.

There are several areas where differences to the built-in PDF producer can be observed:

• Since PdfGraphics2D has been removed from iText 7, SVG images and Graphics2D based images are no longer rendered via Apache Batik.
  • SVG images are directly rendered via iText's SvgConverter. Some SVGs are however not rendered properly.
  • Graphics2D images (such as JFreeChart elements) are converted to SVGs via Batik and then rendered to PDF via SvgConverter. This can have an impact on performance.
• Text line spacing/leading cannot be precisely controlled to exactly match the way text is rendered in AWT. Therefore a slower AWT/iText hybrid renderer is used.
• PDF form elements are created differently than in iText 2, and some styling options are not implemented.
• Complex script text layout (used for Asian languages) has not been tested as it requires a license file.