Is there a GUI for designing PDF reports generated by Java?

I've written some Java code using the iText library to generate a PDF report, but specifying the layout seems very manual and takes a lot of time, re-running the开发者_JAVA百科 code to test small adjustments.

Does anyone know of a report designer for PDFs which would work with Java? It doesn't have to be iText based, that's just what I'm using at the moment.

Yes, JasperReports. It has the iReport visual designer. Also, the API is pretty straightforward.

As far as I know, BIRT is an alternative to JasperReports.

Have in mind that both are complex reporting solutions that support exporting to a number of different formats.

You could look at Docmosis which uses Word or OpenOffice documents to provide the layout and formatting (that is, a template). It has a property you can set that will "watch" templates for changes and automatically process the changes in the background, so you can keep changing a template, then render it again without any code/compile changes.