Why does the function to concatenate / merge PDFs cause issues in some cases?
The code usually works great! But once in a while, it's rotating some of the pages by 90 degrees. Anyone ever have this happen?
I'm using the following code to merge PDFs together using iText:
public static void concatenatePdfs(ListFile> listOfPdfFiles, File outputFile) throws DocumentException, IOException { Document document = new Document(); FileOutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream(outputFile); PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter.getInstance(document, outputStream); document.open(); PdfContentByte cb = writer.getDirectContent(); for (File inFile : listOfPdfFiles) { PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(inFile.getAbsolutePath()); for (int i = 1; i reader.getNumberOfPages(); i++) { document.newPage(); PdfImportedPage page = writer.getImportedPage(reader, i); cb.addTemplate(page, 0, 0); } } document.close(); }
Posted on StackOverflow on Apr 14, 2014 by Nicholas DiPiazza
There are errors once in a while because you are using the wrong method to concatenate documents. You should not use PdfWriter
to concatenate (or merge) PDF documents. That is wrong because:
- You completely ignore the page size of the pages in the original document (you assume they are all of size A4),
- You ignore page boundaries such as the crop box (if present),
- You ignore the rotation value stored in the page dictionary,
- You throw away all interactivity that is present in the original document, and so on.
Concatenating PDFs was done using PdfCopy
in iText 5. In iText 7 we create a new PdfDocument
and use the copyPagesTo()
method, like this:
PdfWriter writer = new PdfWriter(toFile);
writer.setSmartMode(isSmartModeOn);
PdfDocument pdfDoc = new PdfDocument(writer);
pdfDoc.initializeOutlines();
PdfDocument addedDoc = new PdfDocument(new PdfReader(fromFile));
addedDoc.copyPagesTo(1, addedDoc.getNumberOfPages(), pdfDoc);
addedDoc.close();
pdfDoc.close();
Click this link if you want to see how to answer this question in iText 5.