Android support

[comidan]

Android support wiki article:
https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF/wiki/Android-support

So let's list the tasks required for Android support:

-Classes like awt.Color, Point, Dimensiom can be easily replaced.
-Classes like PdfGraphics2D need to be rewritten from scratch, since they use so much awt logic.
-All the rendering logic is done with awt and needs to be rewritten, retested etc.

There is also: https://github.com/witwall/appengine-awt
https://github.com/bedatadriven/appengine-export

• Could we use this?

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The original issue submission here:

Hi, thank you for your great work.

Just learnt how to use your library with a sample Java application
Then I used some classes I made thanks to your library in an Android environment but disocovered your library is using only AWT without no android.graphics packages suppport.

Any suggestion on how could I move on?

[andob]

hello,

I am also interested in android compatibility. I want to modify this library, to replace awt with android specific code.

1. I can work on this repo on another branch; create openpdf-awt, openpdf-android modules, in openpdf module we would have abstract classes without graphics logic (ie AbstractImage instead of Image). In openpdf-awt module I would pull awt logic from the base module (ie Image implementation with awt). In openpdf-android module I would develop android specific graphics code (ie Image implementation based on android)

2. (The quick way) I can fork this repo and keep only a small part of the classes / components, only those that I actually need in my project. I can make those classes android compatible. I currently only need paragraphs, images and tables. In time, I will migrate more and more components. Then I can apply option (1).

[comidan]

@andob Well yeah that would be great, I thought to do it myself after asking for compatibility but I later realized I have already too much work to do at college.

However I resolved this missing compatibility by bypassing it : deployed a Servlet on AWS' Elastic Beanstalk using Apache Tomcat and then getting via HTTP response the processed PDF in the Android app

Yeah that's quite a trip, so I hope there'll be android support soon

[noavarice]

@andob @Daniele-Comi @andreasrosdal
AFAIU there's no specific need to use AWT in the library - there is just a need to specify a font color, so developers have decided to use AWT Color. So I guess it's just should be replaced with custom way to specify color to avoid pulling whole AWT JDK module which is completely redundant.

[karishmapujara]

Hello @andob @Daniele-Comi @andreasrosdal
Any news on Android support?

[BobbyRuby]

I don't have the skill to have this support Android, so hoping someone takes this one soon.

[andob]

@BobbyRuby hello,

Sorry to dissapoint, but porting to android is a quite difficult task and needs some time. You can find awt references in many places. Classes like awt.Color, Point, Dimensiom can be easily replaced. But classes like PdfGraphics2D need to be rewritten from scratch, since they use so much awt logic. All the rendering logic is done with awt and needs to be rewritten, retested etc.

Coming from a commercial project, we didn't had time for this (and I still don't have enough time), so we explored other options:

• we could use iText 7. It is free if your project is open source, but kind of expensive for Android-based commercial projects
• (this is the option we applied in production) we needed to generate a document when the app was offline. We just used plain html for that. The generated document is created / viewed in html format, not pdf.

[andreasrosdal]

So let's list the tasks required for Android support:

-Classes like awt.Color, Point, Dimensiom can be easily replaced.
-Classes like PdfGraphics2D need to be rewritten from scratch, since they use so much awt logic.
-All the rendering logic is done with awt and needs to be rewritten, retested etc.

There is also: https://github.com/witwall/appengine-awt - Could we use this?

[andob]

@andreasrosdal @BobbyRuby
Well, we could use windwardadmin/android-awt which is based on appengine-awt.

I forked it into this repo - andob/android-awt and converted it to gradle. I tested with my old PDF generating code based on iText, I converted that code to OpenPDF and applied this dependency.

It worked! :)

This is a hack but it seems to work :D. At least with the features I used: generating PDFs with paragraphs, tables, images and normal / bold text with the default font.

@BobbyRuby can you test this on your project and post the issues you found on my repo?