How do I use iText Paragraph class?

The com.itextpdf.text.Paragraph class represent a paragraph in PDF document. The following example show you how to create a simple paragraph. First we create a Paragraph object and then add some texts into it using the Chunk object.

package org.kodejava.itextpdf;

import com.itextpdf.text.Chunk;
import com.itextpdf.text.Document;
import com.itextpdf.text.DocumentException;
import com.itextpdf.text.Paragraph;
import com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfWriter;

import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;

public class ParagraphDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Document doc = new Document();
        try {
            FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("ParagraphDemo.pdf");
            PdfWriter.getInstance(doc, fos);
            doc.open();

            String content = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
            Paragraph paragraph = new Paragraph();
            for (int i = 0; i < 20; i++) {
                Chunk chunk = new Chunk(content);
                paragraph.add(chunk);
            }

            doc.add(paragraph);
            doc.close();
        } catch (DocumentException | FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Maven Dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.itextpdf</groupId>
    <artifactId>itextpdf</artifactId>
    <version>5.5.13.3</version>
</dependency>

Maven Central

How do I break a paragraph into sentences?

This example show you how to use the BreakIterator.getSentenceInstance() to breaks a paragraphs into sentences that composes the paragraph. To get the BreakIterator instance we call the getSentenceInstance() factory method and passes a locale information.

In the count(BreakIterator bi, String source) method we iterate the break to extract sentences that composes the paragraph which value is stored in the paragraph variable.

package org.kodejava.text;

import java.text.BreakIterator;
import java.util.Locale;

public class BreakSentenceExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String paragraph = """
                Line boundary analysis determines where a text \
                string can be broken when line-wrapping. The \
                mechanism correctly handles punctuation and \
                hyphenated words. Actual line breaking needs to \
                also consider the available line width and is \
                handled by higher-level software.
                """;

        BreakIterator iterator = BreakIterator.getSentenceInstance(Locale.US);

        int sentences = count(iterator, paragraph);
        System.out.println("Number of sentences: " + sentences);
    }

    private static int count(BreakIterator bi, String source) {
        int counter = 0;
        bi.setText(source);

        int lastIndex = bi.first();
        while (lastIndex != BreakIterator.DONE) {
            int firstIndex = lastIndex;
            lastIndex = bi.next();

            if (lastIndex != BreakIterator.DONE) {
                String sentence = source.substring(firstIndex, lastIndex);
                System.out.println("sentence = " + sentence);
                counter++;
            }
        }
        return counter;
    }
}

Our program will print the following result on the console screen:

sentence = Line boundary analysis determines where a text string can be broken when line-wrapping. 
sentence = The mechanism correctly handles punctuation and hyphenated words. 
sentence = Actual line breaking needs to also consider the available line width and is handled by higher-level software.

Number of sentences: 3