Unable to cast object of type 'iTextSharp.text.Paragraph' to type 'iTextSharp.text.Table'

If you dig around the issue you will quickly discover that there are two possible solutions:

• use <ignore> attribute
• delete whitespaces between iTextXML tags

Luckily, another simple solution exists: the Parse method of ITextHandler accepts XmlTextReader as a parameter. You just use this feature:

XmlTextReader xmlTemplateReader = new XmlTextReader( source );

/* 

 *  this is crucial for iText to work correctly 

 *  WITHOUT <ignore> and

 *  WITH whitespaces

 *  since whitespaces are automatically removed from the xml

 *

 *  remove the line to see the exception

 */

xmlTemplateReader.WhitespaceHandling = WhitespaceHandling.None;

/* iTextSharp stuff follows */

ITextHandler xmlHandler = new ITextHandler( document );

xmlHandler.Parse( xmlTemplateReader );

There is also another possibility that leads to this exception - it is when the XML document contains table data that do not match the schema. For example if you have:

<itext author="Bruno Lowagie" title="curriculum vitae">

  <chapter numberdepth="0">

    <section numberdepth="0">

      <title font="Times New Roman" encoding="CP1250" size="13" align="Center" 

       leading="13">Title</title>

      <table width="100%" widths="70;70;70" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" columns="3" 

       borderwidth="1" left="true" right="true" top="true" bottom="true" >

        <row>

          <cell borderwidth="1" left="true" right="true" top="true" bottom="true" horizontalalign="Center" verticalalign="Default" colspan="3" grayfill="0.65">

            <phrase font="Times New Roman" encoding="CP1250" size="12" style="bold"></phrase >

          </cell>

        </row>

        SOMETEXTHERE

      </table>

    </section>

  </chapter>

</itext>

Note the misplaced "SOMETEXTHERE".