Convert Excel to PDF. Help please!

[Yan Hu]

Hi there:
I need to write some code to convert an Excel file to a PDF file. I googled it for 2 days. I could not find an open source java lib that can directly do that. I am thinking about using POI to read the Excel file and then use IText to write the contents out as a PDF. Does anyone have experience with this kind of conversion? Is there any better lib or solutions? Thanks in advance.

[Paul Clapham]

That sounds like a good start. I don't think you will find any products because there are too many mismatches between the Excel and PDF models to do anything standard. PDF has pages but Excel doesn't. Excel is mainly concerned with rows and columns but PDF isn't. So it's basically up to you to decide how to map from one to the other, and to write code accordingly.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Just to second what Paul said - there is no general solution. POI or jExcelAPI are your principal ways of reading an XLS file, and iText or PDFBox are the principal ways to generate a PDF.

[Yan Hu]

Thank you guys. Now I am testing it using POI and Itext

[Lorenz Baylon]

yeah i believe iText and PDFBox are good tools to create a pdf file By the way, how about parsing a PDF file, got any suggestions? Thanks.

[Joe Ess]

Yan, have a look at OpenOffice.org. It reads Excel files and can export as PDF. I'm using it to translate Word docs to HTML and PDF. You control the application through a network object protocol. The API is non-trivial, but there's plenty of examples in the api documentation and forums.

[Ulf Dittmer]

lhorenz baylon wrote:

how about parsing a PDF file

The Accessing File Formats FAQ -linked in my signature- has some pointers on this.

[Yan Hu]

Thank you guys.

[Lorenz Baylon]

thanks ulf! juz wanna take the oppotunity, is there a particular java class or jar that would enable extracting of images from a pdf file? thanks

[Jonathan Hurl]

Hey im also still looking for this
A friend of mine showed me some page, think it was http://exceltopdf.org/ but I keep getting an error message when opening the pdf i created...
Is someone currently using a site or program of which they know it works well?
thank you

[James Boswell]

Lorenz

Pdfbox will do that for you although it depends on the image type I believe:

http://pdfbox.apache.org/