In my previous post I attempted to generate PDF on the fly using iText library. My goal was to parse HTML snippet into PDF. Unfortunately, as I discovered iText alone is not powerful enough as HTML parser. iText is not flexible enough to manipulate the CSS. Its understandable, since iText‘s main functionality is PDF generation and not HTML parsing.

While trying to find workaround iText limitations, I came across Flying Saucer Java library. Flying Saucer is XML/XHTML/CSS 2.1 renderer, that uses iText and allows to render CSS stylesheets and XHTML, either static or generated, directly to PDFs.

I want to say that Flying Saucer does a beautiful job. You can check this out by trying to export current post to PDF

Joshua Marinacci, the Flying Saucer project lead wrote a nice tutorial that explains how to generate PDF using Flying Saucer.