Flying Saucer is a pure-Java library for rendering arbitrary well-formed XML (or XHTML) using CSS 2.1 for layout and formatting, output to Swing panels, PDF, and images.

Comprehensive documentation available in The Flying Saucer User's Guide.

If you use Flying Saucer in a project, please tell us; it helps suggest directions for the code and may inspire other developers.

Flying Saucer is distributed under the LGPL. Flying Saucer itself is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later, available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html. You can use Flying Saucer in any way and for any purpose you want as long as you respect the terms of the license. A copy of the LGPL license is included as LICENSE-LGPL-2.1.txt or LICENSE-LGPL-3.txt in our distributions and in our source tree.

Flying Saucer uses a couple of FOSS packages to get the job done. A list of these, along with the license they each have, is listed in the LICENSE file in our distribution.

New releases of Flying Saucer are distributed through Maven. The available artifacts are:

• org.xhtmlrenderer:flying-saucer-core - Core library and Java2D rendering
• org.xhtmlrenderer:flying-saucer-pdf - PDF output using OpenPDF (ex. iText 2.x)
• org.xhtmlrenderer:flying-saucer-pdf-openpdf - not supported anymore (replaced by flying-saucer-pdf)
• org.xhtmlrenderer:flying-saucer-swt - SWT output
• org.xhtmlrenderer:flying-saucer-log4j - Logging plugin for log4j

Flying Saucer from version 9.5.0, requires Java 11 or later. Flying Saucer from version 9.6.0, requires Java 17 or later.

See the sample code under the flying-saucer-examples directory.

flying-saucer-core, flying-saucer-pdf, and flying-saucer-swt must be on the build path, as well as the SWT JAR for your OS.

org.xhtmlrenderer.demo.browser.BrowserStartup will start the browser demo.

Other notable entry points include:

• org.xhtmlrenderer.simple.XHTMLPanel
• org.xhtmlrenderer.pdf.PDFRenderer
• org.xhtmlrenderer.simple.ImageRenderer

See the discussion group for ongoing discussions.

Excerpt from the latest merge/release policy:

If you create a PR that can merge without conflicts, I'll merge it. I might ask for additional changes (or feedback from others), but I expect that will be extremely rare.

The basic contract is this: If you're still using Flying Saucer, need something changed, and are willing to do the work yourself, the change will be accepted and released.

Along that line, please also let me know if you need a release done right away. Otherwise, I'll bundle up the changes and do a release every four to six months as long as it's required.

This is also the reason why Issues are currently deactivated on GitHub.

• Website
• Google Code project page (archived/read-only)
• Google Code Issues (archived/read-only)