Flying saucer is a nice tool for quick PDF generation from a (X)HTML page. Everything worked fine when we tested it at home but when we had a demo at a client’s site, no PDF could be generated. The problem was caused by a little snippet in the header of the HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
The DTD declaration! So we took a look at the flying saucer issue database and found someone who had the same problem.
But another solution is even simpler:
Xerces has a default setting which tells the parser to load external dtds.
Turning this off solved our offline problems:
DocumentBuilderFactory builderFactory =
DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
builderFactory.setFeature(
"http://apache.org/xml/features/nonvalidating/load-external-dtd",
false);
Schneide Blog 
Thanks for the tip!
Thanks, you saved me.