Document Creation

The PdfDocumentBuilder creates a new document with no pages or content. First, for text content, a font must be registered with the builder. Currently this supports Standard 14 fonts provided by Adobe by default and TrueType format fonts.

To add a Standard 14 font use:

public AddedFont AddStandard14Font(Standard14Font type)

Or for a TrueType font use:

AddedFont AddTrueTypeFont(IReadOnlyList<byte> fontFileBytes)

Passing in the bytes of a TrueType file (.ttf). You can check the suitability of a TrueType file for embedding in a PDF document using:

bool CanUseTrueTypeFont(IReadOnlyList<byte> fontFileBytes, out IReadOnlyList<string> reasons)

Which provides a list of reasons why the font cannot be used if the check fails. You should check the license for a TrueType font prior to use, since the compressed font file is embedded in, and distributed with, the resultant document.

The TrueType file must have:

• A CMap table for encoding.
• An OS/2 table for retrieving font descriptor metrics.
• A PostScript table for glyph naming.

The AddedFont class represents a key to the font stored on the document builder. This must be provided when adding text content to pages. To add a page to a document use:

PdfPageBuilder AddPage(PageSize size, bool isPortrait = true)

This creates a new PdfPageBuilder with the specified size. The first added page is page number 1, then 2, then 3, etc. The page builder supports adding text, drawing lines and rectangles and measuring the size of text prior to drawing.

To draw lines and rectangles use the methods:

void DrawLine(PdfPoint from, PdfPoint to, decimal lineWidth = 1)
void DrawRectangle(PdfPoint position, decimal width, decimal height, decimal lineWidth = 1)

The line width can be varied and defaults to 1. Rectangles are unfilled and the fill color cannot be changed at present.

To write text to the page you must have a reference to an AddedFont from the methods on PdfDocumentBuilder as described above. You can then draw the text to the page using:

IReadOnlyList<Letter> AddText(string text, decimal fontSize, PdfPoint position, PdfDocumentBuilder.AddedFont font)

Where position is the baseline of the text to draw. Currently only ASCII text is supported. You can also measure the resulting size of text prior to drawing using the method:

IReadOnlyList<Letter> MeasureText(string text, decimal fontSize, PdfPoint position, PdfDocumentBuilder.AddedFont font)

Which does not change the state of the page, unlike AddText.

Changing the RGB color of text, lines and rectangles is supported using:

void SetStrokeColor(byte r, byte g, byte b)
void SetTextAndFillColor(byte r, byte g, byte b)

Which take RGB values between 0 and 255. The color will remain active for all operations called after these methods until reset is called using:

void ResetColor()

Which resets the color for stroke, fill and text drawing to black.

TokenWriter

The TokenWriter class handles writing any type which implements IToken to a stream. This enables end users to write any tokens in a way which is understood correctly by PDF document reading software.

This can be used to build custom PDF document creating software.