Site iconJava PDF Blog

PDF to HTML conversion – relative positioning of content

One of the most interesting things about developing the PDF to HTML convertor is the number of ideas and enhancements which arise from actual usage. I am constantly surprised at the number of different uses people have found for it and the creative ways it is being used (if you are doing something interesting and would like to write a short blog post to publicise it let us know).

One of the requests we have had from several customers in the ability to use the HTML more flexibly. The content is positioned on the page using CSS. This works fine until users want to manipulate the CSS because we use absolute positions.

So for today’s release we have had an option to place all our content inside a div tag with relative positioning.  We give this div the css tag name ‘jpedal’ as we think this should be reasonably unique. This allows us to use absolute positions within our div and users to alter the CSS and content around it.

The new option is enabled by default in our example code or you can add to your code with this line

/**
* include our content in a Div so you can position relative
*/HTMLoutput.setBooleanValue(HTMLDisplay.EncloseContentInDiv,true);

This should make it much easier if you wish to use the content with your own set of RSS tags or wrap it in other content. Any other suggestions?