Displaying pdf in jsp

I have written a jsp page to display contents of pdf, but end up with ascii codes in jsp. I want to display the contents of pdf in jsp. Whats the part that I have missed. When I try to write the read content in pdf it shows only ascii values and not in readable format

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=${encoding}"></head>

<%@page import="java.io.File"%>
<%@page import="java.io.*"%>
<%@page import="javax.servlet.*"%>
<%@page import="com.itextpdf.text.Image"%>
<%@page import="com.itextpdf.text.Document"%>
<%@page import="com.itextpdf.text.DocumentException"%>
<%@page import="com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfReader"%>
<%@page import="com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfImportedPage"%>
<%@page import="com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfWriter"%>
<%@page import="com.itextpdf.text.pdf.PdfContentByte"%>
<%@ page language="java" contentType="application/pdf; charset=UTF-8"
    pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

<%
    response.reset();
    response.setContentType("application/pdf");
    File file = new File("D:\\TNWRD_Documents\\CHAPTER_II.pdf");
    response.setHeader("Content-Type", "application/pdf");
    response.setHeader("Content-Disposition",
            "inline;filename=Saba_PhBill.pdf");
    response.setContentLength((int) file.length());
    response.setHeader("Content-Type",
            getServletContext().getMimeType(file.getName()));
    response.setHeader("Content-Length", String.valueOf(file.length()));
    //OPen an input stream to the file and post the file contents thru the
    //servlet output stream to the browser
    FileInputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
    ServletOutputStream outs = response.getOutputStream();
    response.setContentLength(in.available());
    byte[] buf = new byte[8192];
    int c = 0;
    try {
        while ((c = in.read(buf, 0, buf.length)) > 0) {
            //System.out.println("size:"+c);
            outs.write(buf, 0, c);
            out.write(outs.toString());
        }

    } catch (IOException ioe) {
        ioe.printStackTrace(System.out);
    } finally {
        outs.flush();
        outs.close();
        in.close();
    }
%>
</html>

JSP is the wrong tool for the job of serving a file download. JSP is designed as a view technology with the intent to easily produce HTML output with taglibs and EL. Basically, with your JSP approach, your PDF file is cluttered with <!DOCTYPE>, <html> etc tags and therefore corrupted and not recognizable as a valid PDF file. This is by the way one of the reasons why using scriptlets is a bad practice. It has namely completely confused you as to how stuff is supposed to work. In this particular case, that is using a normal Java class for the file download job.

You should be using a servlet instead. Here's a kickoff example, assuming that Servlet 3.0 and Java 7 is available:

@WebServlet("/foo.pdf")
public class PdfServlet extends HttpServlet {

    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
        File file = new File("/absolute/path/to/foo.pdf");
        response.setHeader("Content-Type", getServletContext().getMimeType(file.getName()));
        response.setHeader("Content-Length", String.valueOf(file.length()));
        response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "inline; filename=\"foo.pdf\"");
        Files.copy(file.toPath(), response.getOutputStream());
    }

}

(if Servlet 3.0 is not available, then map it in web.xml the usual way, if Java 7 is not available, then use a read/write loop the usual way)

Just copypaste this class in its entirety into your project and open the desired PDF file by /contextpath/Saba_PhBill.pdf instead of /contextpath/youroriginal.jsp (after having organized it in a package and autocompleted the necessary imports in the class, of course).

E.g. as follows in a JSP where you'd like to show the PDF inline:

<object data="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/Saba_PhBill.pdf" type="application/pdf" width="500" height="300">
    <a href="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/Saba_PhBill.pdf">Download file.pdf</a>
</object>

(the <a> link is meant as graceful degradation when the browser being used doesn't support inlining application/pdf content in a HTML document, i.e. when it doesn't have Adobe Reader plugin installed)

<%@ page import="java.io.File" %><%@ page import="org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils" %><%
File pdfFile = (File) request.getAttribute("pdf");
byte[] pdfByteArray = FileUtils.readFileToByteArray(pdfFile);
response.setContentType("application/pdf");
response.getOutputStream().write(pdfByteArray);
response.getOutputStream().flush();
%>

It's important ensure there are no new-lines (or other whitespace) outside the scriptlet tags.

They made me do it, okay?!

I could see multiple problems:

There are extra html tags at the top and bottom of your JSP. You do not want them there - you only want to have the pdf contents in your response output.
The code sets content type is multiple times. That is probably not the root cause, however make sure you do it only once (set it to application/pdf)
In the while loop, data are first written to the response output stream, then a toString() is written to the out (which is actually a Writer instance opened on the response output stream - the one in outs). Only use the response stream in the loop, as

while ((c = in.read(buf, 0, buf.length)) > 0) { outs.write(buf, 0, c); }

Displaying pdf in jsp

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