I think you can open you html file in Chrome. Then print it to pdf format. Then it will works.

That is when you print it, you choose "save as pdf" rather than your printer.

I used ITextRenderer from the Flying Saucer project.

Here is a short, self-contained, working example. In my case I wanted to later stream the bytes into an email attachment.

So, in the example I write it to a file purely for the sake of demonstration for this question. This is Java 8.

import com.lowagie.text.DocumentException;
import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;
import org.xhtmlrenderer.pdf.ITextRenderer;

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

public class So4712641 {

  public static void main(String... args) throws DocumentException, IOException {
    FileUtils.writeByteArrayToFile(new File("So4712641.pdf"), toPdf("<b>You gotta walk and don't look back</b>"));
  }

  /**
   * Generate a PDF document
   * @param html HTML as a string
   * @return bytes of PDF document
   */
  private static byte[] toPdf(String html) throws DocumentException, IOException {
    final ITextRenderer renderer = new ITextRenderer();
    renderer.setDocumentFromString(html);
    renderer.layout();
    try (ByteArrayOutputStream fos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(html.length())) {
      renderer.createPDF(fos);
      return fos.toByteArray();
    }
  }
}

This gives me

For completeness, here are relevant pieces for my Maven pom.xml

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.xhtmlrenderer</groupId>
        <artifactId>flying-saucer-pdf</artifactId>
        <version>9.0.8</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>commons-io</groupId>
        <artifactId>commons-io</artifactId>
        <version>2.4</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>