Editing an existing PDF without using iText

Question

I want to add an index page to existing PDF file. And add page numbers to the page of the pdf file.
All the suggested solutions point towards creating a new pdf and merging the existing pdf file with the new one.

Is there any other way for this ?? Also I dont want to use itext since its not free for commercial uses.

Answer 1

According to your comments to the original question, you think in PDFBox

for adding a new page & content, you need to create a new pdf add new content and then merge the existing pdf. I wanted to avoid the merging step. Renaming is not the issue

You might want to try something like this:

PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(new FileInputStream(new File("original.pdf")));
PDPage page = new PDPage();
// fill page
doc.addPage(page);
doc.save("original-plus-page.pdf");

EDIT: In a comment to the answer the question arose how to insert a new page at specific index(page number). To do this, obviously the doc.addPage(page) has to be changed somehow.

Originally this PDDocument method is defined like this:

/**
 * This will add a page to the document.  This is a convenience method, that
 * will add the page to the root of the hierarchy and set the parent of the
 * page to the root.
 *
 * @param page The page to add to the document.
 */
public void addPage( PDPage page )
{
    PDPageNode rootPages = getDocumentCatalog().getPages();
    rootPages.getKids().add( page );
    page.setParent( rootPages );
    rootPages.updateCount();
}

We merely need a similar function which merely does not simply add the page to the kids but instead adds it at a given index. Thus a helper method like the following in our code will do:

public static void addPage(PDDocument doc, int index, PDPage page)
{
    PDPageNode rootPages = doc.getDocumentCatalog().getPages();
    rootPages.getKids().add(index, page);
    page.setParent(rootPages);
    rootPages.updateCount();
}

If you now replace the line

doc.addPage(page);

in the code of the original answer by

addPage(doc, page, 0);

the empty page is added up front.