The layoutmanager package extends org.apache.PdfBox with tools for line-breaking, page-breaking, tables, and styles. It provides an abstraction that lets lines and shaded backgrounds cross physical pages (vertically) to produce a larger logical page. This allows text, table cells, and images flow naturally from one page to the next.

Unlike the PDF spec and PDFBox, all measurements are specified in positive document units and all positioning is specified from the top-left corner of the item being positioned. Like PDFBox, positive y-values are toward the top of the page, so you have to *decrement* y every time you move down a line.

Items are given a Z-index internally to determine which overwrites which when there is overlap. If two items overlap and have the same Z-index, the last one specified overwrites the first (they are simply rendered in order).

Classes representing page objects are designed to minimize mutability and side-effects, but PdfLayoutMgr and the underlying PDFContentStream it acts upon are mutable, have side effects (they write output), and are NOT thread-safe.

Start by looking at the unit test and the sample PDF it builds. Then PdfLayoutMgr is the class to start with to use the API yourself.