Why is flying saucer always printing PDF on A4 paper? - pdf

Question

I'm trying to save an html document to PDF using flyingsaucer but the generated document always ends up having an A4 dimension when I look at the Document Properties from Adobe Reader (Page Size: 8.26 x 11.69 in).
I did read the documentation and I'm passing the css #page {size: letter;} style. And while it does have an effect on the output, the page size always remains 8.26 x 11.69 in Adobe Reader. For example, if I set the page size to legal, my PDF is still the size of a A4 but the top of the document is missing as if it had fell off the "paper".
I'm not sure if the problem falls on the itext side or the flying saucer side. I was using a fairly old version so my first step was to upgrade to the latest 9.1.6 version of flying saucer. I also moved from itext 2.0.8 to openPDF 1.0.1 but I'm still getting the same behavior.
I also traced in the debugger up to the com.lowagie.text.Document creation in ITextRenderer and at this point the document size passed is correct. That makes me think that the issue might be in openPDF / iText but I can't find what I'm doing wrong.

Answer 1

It turns out the PDF generation was correctly using the #page size declaration and the problem was occurring later in our software. What I had not noticed is that after the generation of the PDF another method was called to merge multiple PDFs into one. This method should probably not have been called, but that's another story.
The bottom line is this method created a new com.lowagie.text.Document(), which by default creates an A4 sized document, and then was iterating over all pages of the pdf, adding the pages to the new document using pdfWriter.getImportedPage(pdfReader, currentPage++). These imported pages did not retain their original size.
I fixed it by passing the page size of the fist page when creating the merged document object:
document = new Document(pdfReader.getPageSize(1));

Answer 2

The real problem is that you're (unwittingly) using software that is no longer supported. Anything that still has the namespace lowagie (the founder and CTO of iText) is really outdated.
If you simply want to convert HTML to pdf, why not use iText directly and cut out the middle-man?
We have multiple options for you.
XMLWorker (iText5 based code that converts HTML to pdf)
pdfHTML (iText7 based add-on that converts HTML5/CSS3 to pdf)
This is a rather extensive code-sample for using pdfHTML:
public void createPdf(String src, String dest, String resources) throws IOException {
try {
FileOutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream(dest);
WriterProperties writerProperties = new WriterProperties();
//Add metadata
writerProperties.addXmpMetadata();
PdfWriter pdfWriter = new PdfWriter(outputStream, writerProperties);
PdfDocument pdfDoc = new PdfDocument(pdfWriter);
pdfDoc.getCatalog().setLang(new PdfString("en-US"));
//Set the document to be tagged
pdfDoc.setTagged();
pdfDoc.getCatalog().setViewerPreferences(new PdfViewerPreferences().setDisplayDocTitle(true));
//Set meta tags
PdfDocumentInfo pdfMetaData = pdfDoc.getDocumentInfo();
pdfMetaData.setAuthor("Joris Schellekens");
pdfMetaData.addCreationDate();
pdfMetaData.getProducer();
pdfMetaData.setCreator("iText Software");
pdfMetaData.setKeywords("example, accessibility");
pdfMetaData.setSubject("PDF accessibility");
//Title is derived from html
// pdf conversion
ConverterProperties props = new ConverterProperties();
FontProvider fp = new FontProvider();
fp.addStandardPdfFonts();
fp.addDirectory(resources);//The noto-nashk font file (.ttf extension) is placed in the resources
props.setFontProvider(fp);
props.setBaseUri(resources);
//Setup custom tagworker factory for better tagging of headers
DefaultTagWorkerFactory tagWorkerFactory = new AccessibilityTagWorkerFactory();
props.setTagWorkerFactory(tagWorkerFactory);
HtmlConverter.convertToPdf(new FileInputStream(src), pdfDoc, props);
pdfDoc.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
You can find more information at http://itextpdf.com/itext7/pdfHTML