Metadata, Compression and Best Practices

Document Metadata

PdfDocumentInfo info = pdf.getDocumentInfo();
info.setTitle("Invoice INV-2026-001");
info.setAuthor("GroovyGrails");
info.setCreator("Billing Service v2");

Checklist

• License: iText 7 Core is AGPL — buy a commercial license for closed-source products, or evaluate OpenPDF/PDFBox for permissive licensing.
• Close documents in try-with-resources; generate to a temp file then atomic-move for served downloads.
• Embed fonts you rely on (pdf.setDefaultPageSize aside, unembedded fonts render differently per machine).
• Reuse PdfFont instances; creating them per paragraph is slow.
• Compress: iText compresses streams by default; downscale images before adding them — a 3 MB photo in a one-page invoice is the classic bloat.