How to change the spacing between words and characters?

I want to set the text alignment to justified, but I don't want iText to add any extra space between the characters.

I don't want extra space between the characters (see figure 1). I prefer space between words as shown in figure 2.

Different spacing when justifying text

With this code, I get the result shown in figure 1.

public static void main(String[] args) throws DocumentException, IOException {
    Document document = new Document();
    PdfWriter.getInstance(document, new FileOutputStream("abc.pdf"));
    BaseFont bf1 = BaseFont.createFont(
        BaseFont.TIMES_ROMAN, "iso-8859-9", BaseFont.EMBEDDED);
    Font font1 = new Font(bf1);
    document.open();
    Paragraph paragraph2 = new Paragraph();
    paragraph2.setAlignment(Element.ALIGN_JUSTIFIED);
    paragraph2.setFont(font1);
    paragraph2.setIndentationLeft(20);
    paragraph2.setIndentationRight(20);
    paragraph2.add("HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld"+
        "HelloWorld HelloWorldHelloWorldHelloWorldHelloWorld"+
        "HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorldHelloWorldHelloWorld");
    document.add(paragraph2);
    document.close();
}

How can I change this code to get a result like in figure 2?

Posted on StackOverflow on Jun 16, 2015 by Osman Yilmaz

Please take a look at the SpaceCharRatioExample to find out how to create a PDF that looks like space_char_ratio.pdf:

Spacing between words

When you justify a paragraph, iText will add extra space between the words and between the characters. You can change this default like using the setSpacingRatio() method:

public void manipulatePdf(String dest) throws IOException {
    PdfDocument pdfDoc = new PdfDocument(new PdfWriter(dest));
    Document doc = new Document(pdfDoc);
    Paragraph p = new Paragraph().
            .setSpacingRatio(1)
            .setTextAlignment(TextAlignment.JUSTIFIED)
            .setMarginLeft(20)
            .setMarginRight(20)
            .add("HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld" +
                    "HelloWorld HelloWorldHelloWorldHelloWorldHelloWorld" +
                    "HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorld HelloWorldHelloWorldHelloWorld");
    doc.add(p);
    doc.close();
}

Click How to change the spacing between words and characters? if you want to see how to answer this question in iText 5.