How do I change the border color of a PdfPCell? | iText 5 PDF Development Guide

I am trying to set border colors of table cells. No matter what I try, the border color is not changing - it's always black! What am I doing wrong?

Here's my test code. cell1 should have a red top border and a blue bottom border:

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Please take a look at the ColoredBorder example. I have to admit: there's an inconsistency in iText.

By default, all borders are equal in iText. If you change the color of one border, you have to add an extra line:

With the setUseVariableBorders() method, we tell iText that the borders aren't equal. As you can see, the colors are now respected:

Different cell border widths and colors

Using setUseVariableBorders() isn't necessary if you change the width of a border. In that case, the default is change automatically (this is the inconsistency I mentioned earlier):

As you can see, there are still two black borders in cell 1 and cell 2. We can remove these with the setBorder() method:

If you look at cell 2, you see that we have chosen rather thick borders. As a result these borders overlap with the text in the cell. We can avoid this with the setUseBorderPadding() method:

Now the border will be taken into account when calculating the padding.