Is there a GUI for designing PDF reports generated by Java?

Question

I've written some Java code using the iText library to generate a PDF report, but specifying the layout seems very manual and takes a lot of time, re-running the code to test small adjustments.

Does anyone know of a report designer for PDFs which would work with Java? It doesn't have to be iText based, that's just what I'm using at the moment.

Answer 1

Yes, JasperReports . It has the iReport visual designer. Also, the API is pretty straightforward.

As far as I know, BIRT is an alternative to JasperReports.

Have in mind that both are complex reporting solutions that support exporting to a number of different formats.

Answer 2

You could look at Docmosis which uses Word or OpenOffice documents to provide the layout and formatting (that is, a template). It has a property you can set that will "watch" templates for changes and automatically process the changes in the background, so you can keep changing a template, then render it again without any code/compile changes.