How to generate multiple lines in PDF using Apache pdfbox

Adding to the answer of Mark you might want to know where to split your long string. You can use the PDFont method getStringWidth for that.

Putting everything together you get something like this (with minor differences depending on the PDFBox version):

PDFBox 1.8.x

PDDocument doc = null;
try
{
    doc = new PDDocument();
    PDPage page = new PDPage();
    doc.addPage(page);
    PDPageContentStream contentStream = new PDPageContentStream(doc, page);

    PDFont pdfFont = PDType1Font.HELVETICA;
    float fontSize = 25;
    float leading = 1.5f * fontSize;

    PDRectangle mediabox = page.findMediaBox();
    float margin = 72;
    float width = mediabox.getWidth() - 2*margin;
    float startX = mediabox.getLowerLeftX() + margin;
    float startY = mediabox.getUpperRightY() - margin;

    String text = "I am trying to create a PDF file with a lot of text contents in the document. I am using PDFBox"; 
    List<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();
    int lastSpace = -1;
    while (text.length() > 0)
    {
        int spaceIndex = text.indexOf(' ', lastSpace + 1);
        if (spaceIndex < 0)
            spaceIndex = text.length();
        String subString = text.substring(0, spaceIndex);
        float size = fontSize * pdfFont.getStringWidth(subString) / 1000;
        System.out.printf("'%s' - %f of %f\n", subString, size, width);
        if (size > width)
        {
            if (lastSpace < 0)
                lastSpace = spaceIndex;
            subString = text.substring(0, lastSpace);
            lines.add(subString);
            text = text.substring(lastSpace).trim();
            System.out.printf("'%s' is line\n", subString);
            lastSpace = -1;
        }
        else if (spaceIndex == text.length())
        {
            lines.add(text);
            System.out.printf("'%s' is line\n", text);
            text = "";
        }
        else
        {
            lastSpace = spaceIndex;
        }
    }
        
    contentStream.beginText();
    contentStream.setFont(pdfFont, fontSize);
    contentStream.moveTextPositionByAmount(startX, startY);            
    for (String line: lines)
    {
        contentStream.drawString(line);
        contentStream.moveTextPositionByAmount(0, -leading);
    }
    contentStream.endText(); 
    contentStream.close();

    doc.save("break-long-string.pdf");
}
finally
{
    if (doc != null)
    {
        doc.close();
    }
}

(BreakLongString.java test testBreakString for PDFBox 1.8.x)

PDFBox 2.0.x

PDDocument doc = null;
try
{
    doc = new PDDocument();
    PDPage page = new PDPage();
    doc.addPage(page);
    PDPageContentStream contentStream = new PDPageContentStream(doc, page);

    PDFont pdfFont = PDType1Font.HELVETICA;
    float fontSize = 25;
    float leading = 1.5f * fontSize;

    PDRectangle mediabox = page.getMediaBox();
    float margin = 72;
    float width = mediabox.getWidth() - 2*margin;
    float startX = mediabox.getLowerLeftX() + margin;
    float startY = mediabox.getUpperRightY() - margin;

    String text = "I am trying to create a PDF file with a lot of text contents in the document. I am using PDFBox"; 
    List<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();
    int lastSpace = -1;
    while (text.length() > 0)
    {
        int spaceIndex = text.indexOf(' ', lastSpace + 1);
        if (spaceIndex < 0)
            spaceIndex = text.length();
        String subString = text.substring(0, spaceIndex);
        float size = fontSize * pdfFont.getStringWidth(subString) / 1000;
        System.out.printf("'%s' - %f of %f\n", subString, size, width);
        if (size > width)
        {
            if (lastSpace < 0)
                lastSpace = spaceIndex;
            subString = text.substring(0, lastSpace);
            lines.add(subString);
            text = text.substring(lastSpace).trim();
            System.out.printf("'%s' is line\n", subString);
            lastSpace = -1;
        }
        else if (spaceIndex == text.length())
        {
            lines.add(text);
            System.out.printf("'%s' is line\n", text);
            text = "";
        }
        else
        {
            lastSpace = spaceIndex;
        }
    }

    contentStream.beginText();
    contentStream.setFont(pdfFont, fontSize);
    contentStream.newLineAtOffset(startX, startY);
    for (String line: lines)
    {
        contentStream.showText(line);
        contentStream.newLineAtOffset(0, -leading);
    }
    contentStream.endText(); 
    contentStream.close();

    doc.save(new File(RESULT_FOLDER, "break-long-string.pdf"));
}
finally
{
    if (doc != null)
    {
        doc.close();
    }
}

(BreakLongString.java test testBreakString for PDFBox 2.0.x)

The result

This looks as expected.

Of course there are numerous improvements to make but this should show how to do it.

Adding unconditional line breaks

In a comment aleskv asked:

could you add line breaks when there are \n in the string?

One can easily extend the solution to unconditionally break at newline characters by first splitting the string at ‘\n’ characters and then iterating over the split result.

E.g. if instead of the long string from above

String text = "I am trying to create a PDF file with a lot of text contents in the document. I am using PDFBox"; 

you want to process this even longer string with embedded new line characters

String textNL = "I am trying to create a PDF file with a lot of text contents in the document. I am using PDFBox.\nFurthermore, I have added some newline characters to the string at which lines also shall be broken.\nIt should work alright like this...";

you can simply replace

String text = "I am trying to create a PDF file with a lot of text contents in the document. I am using PDFBox"; 
List<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();
int lastSpace = -1;
while (text.length() > 0)
{
    [...]
}

in the solutions above by

String textNL = "I am trying to create a PDF file with a lot of text contents in the document. I am using PDFBox.\nFurthermore, I have added some newline characters to the string at which lines also shall be broken.\nIt should work alright like this..."; 
List<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();
for (String text : textNL.split("\n"))
{
    int lastSpace = -1;
    while (text.length() > 0)
    {
        [...]
    }
}

(from BreakLongString.java test testBreakStringNL)

The result: