PDF file creation: iText

iText is a free Java class library to create PDF files.

Features:

• Barcode generation with or without fonts (Code 39, Code 128, EAN13, EAN8, UPCA, UPCE, and EAN with supplemental 5, EAN with supplemental 5, EAN with supplemental 2, Interleaved 2 of 5, Postnet and Planet)
• PDF encryption
  
• Headers and footers
• Absolute positioning of graphics (PNG, GIF, JPEG, WMF) and text
• Table support (see also the more advanced PDFTable class)
  
• Metadata manipulation
• HTML output
  
• RTF output
• Local and remote goto, destinations and outlines
• Includes tools to concat, split, create a handout and encrypt PDF files
• etc...
  

Below is a simple bar code example taken from the documentation:

PdfContentByte cb = writer.getDirectContent();
BarcodeEAN codeEAN = new BarcodeEAN();
codeEAN.setCodeType(codeEAN.EAN13);
codeEAN.setCode("9780201615883");
Image imageEAN = codeEAN.createImageWithBarcode(cb, null, null);
document.add(new Phrase(new Chunk(imageEAN, 0, 0)));


There´s also an iText ant task (from the Fopps project) which takes an XML file as input and generates a PDF file (HTML and RTF are also supported).
Below is an example, which builds a pdf document out of plain.xml. Every page contains the header 'My header' and the footer 'Page x of y':


<itext
src="Plain.xml"
dest="Test1.pdf"
header="My header"
footer="pagenumbering">
</itext>