How to create a table with 2 rows that can be used as a footer?

I want to add footer with 2 rows. The 1st row will have the document name with a background color. The 2nd row will have copyright notices. I tried to create this table using ColumnText, but I am not able to set the background color for the row (only the text is getting background color).

Posted on StackOverflow on Mar 2, 2014 by Satesh S

You can set the background of a cell using the setBackgroundColor() method and you can add a table at an absolute position using the writeSelectedRows() method.

Take a look at the TableFooter example:

PdfPTable table = new PdfPTable(1);
table.setTotalWidth(523);
PdfPCell cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase("This is a test document"));
cell.setBackgroundColor(BaseColor.ORANGE);
table.addCell(cell);
cell = new PdfPCell(new Phrase("This is a copyright notice"));
cell.setBackgroundColor(BaseColor.LIGHT_GRAY);
table.addCell(cell);

If you have more than one cell in a row, you need to set the background for all cells. Note that I'm defining a total width for the table (523 is the width of the page minus the margins). The total width is needed because we'll add the table using writeSelectedRows():

footer.writeSelectedRows(0, -1, 36, 64, writer.getDirectContent());

The resulting PDF looks like this. Make sure you define the margins of your page in such a way that the footer table doesn't overlap with the page content.

Click this link if you want to see how to answer this question in iText 7.