PDFBox - Creating a PDF Document

Let us now understand how to create a PDF document using the PDFBox library.

Creating an Empty PDF Document

You can create an empty PDF Document by instantiating the PDDocument class. You can save the document in your desired location using the Save() method.

Following are the steps to create an empty PDF document.

Step 1: Creating an Empty Document

The PDDocument class that belongs to the package org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel, is an In-memory representation of the PDFDocument. Therefore, by instantiating this class, you can create an empty PDFDocument as shown in the following code block.

PDDocument document = new PDDocument();

Step 2: Saving the Document

After creating the document, you need to save this document in the desired path, you can do so using the Save() method of the PDDocument class. This method accepts a string value, representing the path where you want to store the document, as a parameter. Following is the prototype of the save() method of the PDDocument class.

document.save("Path");

Step 3: Closing the Document

When your task is completed, at the end, you need to close the PDDocument object using the close () method. Following is the prototype of the close() method of PDDocument class.

document.close();

Example

This example demonstrates the creation of a PDF Document. Here, we will create a Java program to generate a PDF document named my_doc.pdf and save it in the path C:/PdfBox_Examples/. Save this code in a file with name Document_Creation.java.

import java.io.IOException; 
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
  
public class Document_Creation {
    
   public static void main (String args[]) throws IOException {
       
      //Creating PDF document object 
      PDDocument document = new PDDocument();    
       
      //Saving the document
      document.save("C:/PdfBox_Examples/my_doc.pdf");
         
      System.out.println("PDF created");  
    
      //Closing the document  
      document.close();

   }  
}

Compile and execute the saved Java file from the command prompt using the following commands.

javac Document_Creation.java 
java Document_Creation

Upon execution, the above program creates a PDF document displaying the following message.

PDF created

If you verify the specified path, you can find the created PDF document as shown below.

Since this is an empty document, if you try to open this document, this gives you a prompt displaying an error message as shown in the following screenshot.