Try freeBuy now
Try freeBuy now
 
 

Newsletters, catalogs, glossaries and price lists read better in narrow columns than in lines that run across the whole page. PD4ML v3 users have long relied on generateMulticolumn() for exactly that – and with PD4ML v4.0.24 and v4.1.2 the feature is back, rebuilt for the v4 rendering pipeline.

One call

PD4ML pd4ml = new PD4ML();
pd4ml.generateMulticolumn(2, 8, true);   // 2 columns per page, 8 mm gap
pd4ml.readHTML(new URL("file:newsletter.html"));
pd4ml.writePDF(fos);

The call is the same as in v3, so existing v3 code carries over unchanged.

How it works

  • The document is laid out to the width of a column, and the columns of each page are filled one after another. Every page break – the ones the layout finds as well as <pd4ml:page.break> – moves on to the next column; after the last column a new page starts.
  • <pd4ml:page.break multicolumn="true"/> starts a new page right away, for example for an appendix or a new chapter.
  • Page headers, footers, backgrounds and watermarks belong to the page, not to a column: they span all columns, and $[page] / $[total] count pages, not columns.
  • Footnotes are placed at the bottom of the column that refers to them; links and bookmarks point to the right column.
  • Any page format works: three columns on landscape A4 are one setPageSize(PageSize.A4.rotate()) away.

See it in action

Two new runnable examples in the pd4ml-examples repository, each with its HTML source and the resulting PDF:

Documentation

Availability

Multicolumn layout is part of the PD4ML v4.0.24 and v4.1.2 snapshot builds, already available for download and from the PD4ML Maven repository. It applies to PDF output; as in v3, it is ignored together with adjustHtmlWidth() and fitPageVertically().

Questions or a layout that doesn’t come out as expected? Let us know – we’d like to see your multicolumn documents.