what's the simpliest code to display a PDF file inside a JTextArea??

Find a library which can read the PDF for you and then do something like JTextArea.setText().

You can find a pretty comprehensive list of libraries to read and write PDF documents (both commercial and free) here and here.

Once you extract the text from the PDF file, displaying it should not be too much of problem.

rude04 as Ezzaral suggested here, Acrobat Viewer bean will be the easiest solution based on your knowledge of Java

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