I want to create the first two pages with a blue background color and the remaining pages in white, but when I try this every page becomes blue.

I'm creating report based on client activity. I'm creating this report with the help of the iText PDF library. I want to create the first two pages with a blue background color (for product name and disclaimer notes) and the remaining pages in white (without a background color). I colored two pages at the very beginning of report with blue using following code.

Rectangle pageSize = new Rectangle(PageSize.A4);
pageSize.setBackgroundColor(new BaseColor(84, 141, 212));
Document document = new Document( pageSize );

But when I move to 3rd page using document.newpage(), the page is still in blue. I can't change the color of 3rd page. I want to change the color of 3rd page onward to white. How can I do this using iText?

Posted on StackOverflow on May 13, 2015 by Arun jk

Please take a look at the PageBackgrounds example and page_backgrounds.pdf

To set different backgrounds I create a page event handler using iText 7:

protected class PageBackgroundsEventHandler implements IEventHandler {
    @Override
    public void handleEvent(Event event) {
        PdfDocumentEvent docEvent = (PdfDocumentEvent) event;
        PdfPage page = docEvent.getPage();

        int pagenumber = docEvent.getDocument().getNumberOfPages();
        if (pagenumber % 2 == 1 && pagenumber != 1) {
            return;
        }
        PdfCanvas canvas = new PdfCanvas(page);
        Rectangle rect = page.getPageSize();
        canvas
                .saveState()
                .setFillColor(pagenumber + 1

As you can see, I first check for the page number. If it's an odd number and if it's not equal to 1, I don't do anything.

However, if I'm on page 1 or 2, or if the page number is even, I get the PdfCanvas from the current PdfPage and the dimension of this page. I then set the fill color to either blue or light gray (depending on the page number), and construct the path for a rectangle that covers the complete page. Finally, I fill that rectangle with the fill color.

Now that we've got our custom PageBackgroundsEventHandler, we can use it like this:

PdfDocument pdfDoc = new PdfDocument(new PdfWriter(DEST));
pdfDoc.addEventHandler(PdfDocumentEvent.START_PAGE, new PageBackgroundsEventHandler());

Feel free to adapt the PageBackgroundsEventHandler class if you need a different behavior.

Click How to change the color of pages? if you want to see how to answer this question in iText 5.