In PDFBox, how to change the origin (0,0) point of a PDRectangle object?

Question

The Situation:
In PDFBox, PDRectangle objects\' default origin (0,0) seems to be the lower-left corner of a page.

For example, the following code gives

Answer 1

The accepted answer created some problems for me. Also, text being mirrored and adjusting for that just didn't seem like the right solution for me. So here's what I came up with and so far, this has worked pretty smoothly.

Solution (example available below):

• Call the getAdjustedPoints(...) method with your original points as you are drawing on paper where x=0 and y=0 is top left corner.
• This method will return float array (length 4) that can be used to draw rect
• Array order is x, y, width and height. Just pass that addRect(...) method

---

private float[] getAdjustedPoints(PDPage page, float x, float y, float width, float height) {
    float resizedWidth = getSizeFromInches(width);
    float resizedHeight = getSizeFromInches(height);
    return new float[] {
            getAdjustedX(page, getSizeFromInches(x)),
            getAdjustedY(page, getSizeFromInches(y)) - resizedHeight,
            resizedWidth, resizedHeight
    };
}

private float getSizeFromInches(float inches) {
    // 72 is POINTS_PER_INCH - it's defined in the PDRectangle class
    return inches * 72f;
}

private float getAdjustedX(PDPage page, float x) {
    return x + page.getCropBox().getLowerLeftX();
}

private float getAdjustedY(PDPage page, float y) {
    return -y + page.getCropBox().getUpperRightY();
}

---

Example:

private PDPage drawPage1(PDDocument document) {
    PDPage page = new PDPage(PDRectangle.LETTER);

    try {
        // Gray Color Box
        PDPageContentStream contentStream = new PDPageContentStream(document, page, PDPageContentStream.AppendMode.APPEND, false, false);
        contentStream.setNonStrokingColor(Color.decode(MyColors.Gallery));
        float [] p1 = getAdjustedPoints(page, 0f, 0f, 8.5f, 1f);
        contentStream.addRect(p1[0], p1[1], p1[2], p1[3]);
        contentStream.fill();

        // Disco Color Box
        contentStream.setNonStrokingColor(Color.decode(MyColors.Disco));
        p1 = getAdjustedPoints(page, 4.5f, 1f, 4, 0.25f);
        contentStream.addRect(p1[0], p1[1], p1[2], p1[3]);
        contentStream.fill();

        contentStream.close();
    } catch (Exception e) { }

    return page;
}

As you can see, I've drawn 2 rectangle boxes.
To draw this, I used the the following coordinates which assumes that x=0 and y=0 is top left.

Gray Color Box: x=0, y=0, w=8.5, h=1
Disco Color Box: x=4.5 y=1, w=4, h=0.25

Here's an image of my result.