iText®, a JAVA PDF library / News: Recent posts

We promised shorter release cycles to tackle problems with the major release of iText 2 less than three weeks ago, and now we are keeping our promise.
In today's release (iText 2.0.1), we have fixed some issues with new functionality introduced in iText 2. This involved bug fixes, as well as code clean up and the removal of debugging code.
There was also a lot of activity on the RTF package (welcome back, Mark!) and on the PDF front some new functionality was added concerning usage rights, encryption and digital signatures.
The general refactoring operations are still ongoing, so you can expect release 2.0.2 pretty soon.
For those interested to see Bruno Lowagie (me) in action, the JavaPolis interview with Ted Neward is online: http://itext.ugent.be/articles/press/jp_interview.php
Enjoy!

iText, the free/open source Java-PDF library, is hot! Book reviews about 'iText in Action' are appearing everywhere, and they are all very positive. This is of course a strong motivator to keep up the good work on iText.
In the past two months iText has undergone quite a metamorfosis. All the examples that are discussed in the book still work, but some obsolete classes, interfaces and methods were removed. Some classes have also undergone huge changes internally.
At the same time a lot of new functionality was added: certificate encryption of PDF files, portable collections (PDF 1.7), new printer preferences (PDF 1.7), support for GoToE (PDF 1.6), first line indent for paragraphs, and much more.
As a matter of fact, we provided a new tutorial page: http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/itext2/
From this page, we'll link to new examples that explain how to work with the new functionality soon.
best regards,
Bruno

iText is hot! It's the most important Java tool to create and manipulate PDF documents. That's the impression I have after the overdose of attention the project received at JavaPolis last week:

• There was an article about the F/OSS library iText in JavaNews, a special JavaPolis edition of DataNews:
• http://itext.ugent.be/articles/press/JavaNews.jpg (NL)
• http://itext.ugent.be/articles/press/JavaNewsFr.jpg (FR)
• The product was mentioned in the daily publications distributed during the event (my talk was one of the 'hot picks' of the day, and there was a user story from somebody who attended JavaPolis especially to hear more about iText).
• There was a RAD Race and the use of iText was one of the requirements of the competition.
• iText was mentioned in the keynote of the Conference Days.
• After my presentation on Thursday I was overwhelmed by the user response (a company even brought me a bottle of Champagne).
• When I arrived at my signing session, the limited number of copies of the book 'iText in Action' that made it to Europe in time had disappeared: it was sold out even before I started my talk.... read more

The book 'iText in Action' is available as an eBook at http://itext.ugent.be/itext-in-action/ since almost two weeks, and already a lot of new users are exploring iText, a free / open source Java-PDF library. A warm welcome to you all!

Yesterday iText 1.4.7 was released. The reason for this release is twofold: (1) it's a good habit to make a release almost once a month (this is our 10th release this year), and (2) we have added some interesting new functionality that will be demonstrated in our demo at JavaPolis in a few weeks: it is now possible to replace a button in an AcroForm. This is useful when you want to add an image to a template in PDF (using AcroForms).... read more

Any time now the final version of the book 'iText in Action' ( http://itext.ugent.be/itext-in-action/ ) will be ready. People who have bought the book at Manning will receive the eBook version in a few weeks. People who want to buy the paper version of the book, will have to be patient a little bit longer: the book will be presented at JavaPolis ( http://javapolis.com/ ) on December 14.

If you are an Open Source programmer, but not interested in Java, don't worry: you can also come and see me at T-DOSE ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/t-dose ) in Eindhoven ( December 2 and 3: http://itext.ugent.be/info/visitors_flyer.pdf ). I'll be talking about PDF solutions in general. It's doesn't matter if you're a Java programmer or not. My demo will also be of interest to PHP, Ruby, Python, and even .NET programmers.... read more

The main reason for this release is the thorough code cleanup performed by Xavier Le Vourch. During this cleanup several unreported bugs were fixed.
Mark Hall integrated some patches sent to the mailing list and SourceForge's bug report pages. He is now working on new tutorial examples.
Paulo fixed some bugs reported on the mailing list and added Unicode support for Annotations.

iText, your favorite library to create and manipulate PDF documents, finally has its book: "iText in Action", published by Manning Publications Co.<br />
Since yesterday 'unedited drafts' of the first 10 chapters were released in the Manning Early Access Program. You can download the <a href="http://manning.com/lowagie/">first chapter for free</a>. By telling an 'almost true story', I give you an overview of all kinds of PDF solutions I used in a production environment in the past 8 years. It's a must-read for developers wanting to enhance their applications with PDF functionality.<br />
Note that the layout of this chapter isn't OK yet (it is, after all, an unedited draft). There are still some minor <a href="http://manning-sandbox.com/thread.jspa?threadID=16133&tstart=0">errors</a>, but it already gives you a good idea about the content of the other chapters. Section 1.3 offers you a visual menu of what will follow in the other 17 chapters.

This is a minor release with some bugfixes (headers/footers in RTF, rotation in PdfPCells), some new features (style attribute in HTMLWorker, alpha compostite in PdfGraphics2D), and some general improvements (null handling, reading files using MappedByteBuffer).
The main caveat with this release, is that iText no longer compiles with JDK 1.3. Read the FAQ ( http://itext.ugent.be/library/question.php?id=19 ) to find out which changes to apply before compiling iText with JDK 1.3.
On an aside note: Bruno will be talking about iText at GovCamp Brussels and BarCamp Brussels next week!
See http://govcamp.org/index.php/GovCamp_Brussels
and http://barcamp.org/BarCampBrussels
If you're in Brussels for OSCON, hop in!

iText is a Java document creation and manipulation engine that can produce PDF and RTF documents.
This new release brings the long awaited support for static PDF forms using the XML Forms Architecture (XFA). As for RTF: it is now possible to import existing RTF content into a newly created RTF document.
Of course there were also numerous bugfixes based on the bugreports and patches posted on SourceForge.
Download iText from:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15255

I have great news: last week I received a message that the book about your favorite PDF library 'iText in Action' ( http://itext.ugent.be/itext-in-action/ ) will be translated to Chinese! The Chinese translation will be published by the Posts & Telecommunications Press.
Meanwhile Paulo and Mark have been fixing bugs and problems that were reported on the mailinglist: problems caused by the page rotation when getting field positions, a bug that set the owner password to null, PdfGraphics2D ameliorations, improved tolerance towards corrupt TIFF files, cell/row spanning problems in RTF tables, and so forth.
No XFA functionality yet, but Paulo is working on it.

Last week Manning Publications Co. announced the book 'iText in Action' in the 'Coming Soon' section of its site. Please find more info about the book on the book description page: http://www.manning.com/lowagie/
Don't forget to register if you want to stay informed about the actual release date.
You can also visit this new iText site: http://itext.ugent.be/ to learn more about iText.

Today iText1.4.2 was released. iText is a very popular Java-PDF library. The most important new features in this release are support for certified PDFs and document level file attachments.
Furthermore there were some bugfixes in the PdfGraphics2D class, the PostScript classes and class Table.

The iText 1.4.1 release is finally there!
Because of all my work on the book 'iText in Action' it took me longer than usual to prepare a new release. Also there is very little new functionality, but I know that you have all been waiting for the numerous bug fixes: better memory management for PdfCopy, Table bug fixes, better support for reading 'bad' TIFF files, and so on.
If all goes well, the book on iText will be out in the fall of 2006. I hope I'll have more time to add new functionality soon.

Hello all,
today I tried the new Google Calendar service (http://www.google.com/calendar/) for the first time. I entered an event and clicked on the printer icon to print a calendar sheet. A PDF file was created on the fly. I saved this PDF file and opened it in Adobe Reader. I clicked File->Document Properties->Description and what did I see???
The PDF was created using iText, your favorite Java-PDF library hosted on SourceForge! This is GREAT!

As most of you know, I am writing a book on iText for Manning publications Co. This week I have reached the fourth milestone (of five) in the writing process. I have handed in the complete manuscript. Currently the manuscript is 487 pages long and it's accompanied by 259 code samples.
These code samples were written for and tested using this new release iText1.4.

iText, your favorite JAVA-PDF Library, will be the project of the month of the Software Developer's Journal in one of the next issues (http://www.sdjournal.org/en/).
The new release was build to be on the CD that accompanies the magazine. Of course, there is also a lot of new stuff in the 1.3.6 version.

You can now define a repeating footer for a PdfPTable. Lists and combo fields can now be set in the AcroFields object. There was some serious debugging activity in the area of class Table (thank you Karsten Klein!). The toolbox looks a little bit different now. There's a new tool that allows you to inspect the internals of a PDF file.
Just check the long changelog list on the history page:
http://www.lowagie.com/iText/history.html#V140... read more

Release early, release often. But what is often? If you look at the recent iText releases, you see there is a release a month.
This month we bring you iText1.3.5 with some interesting new functionality: it is now possible to create Tagged PDFs with iText. This is a first step towards implementing the PDF/A ISO standard.
There was also some work done on the HtmlWorker (to convert portions of HTML to PDF) and a new Event class was added to facilitate the positioning of form fields.
Two new plug-ins were added to the toolbox: one to reverse the order of the pages in a PDF; another one to remove 'launch' actions from a PDF that can form a possible security hazard.
There were also some bugfixes in PdfReader, RtfFont, PdfStamper and so on.

The new iText release brings some extra functionality for filling and flattening PDF forms (by Paulo), some ameliorations concerning resources such as memory and filehandles (by Paulo and Mark), some substantial bugfixes in the RTF generating package (by Mark), enhanced XMP support for PDF and some new plug-ins for the iText toolbox such as a PDF decrypt and a PDF N-up tool (by Bruno).

In this release, new tools were added to the iText Toolbox: you can now extract an HTML page containing the bookmarks of a PDF, you can inspect the properties of a PDF, you can 'burst' a PDF file, generate a new Pdf containing selected pages from an existing one, etc...
Some PdfReader functionality that was broken in 1.3.2 was fixed and some minor bugfixes were applied (for instance to the Image class).
In the RTF package, a switch to enable/disable unicode was added and efforts were made to make the RTF look more like the PDF that is generated.

Hello all,
iText 1.3.2 has been released, bringing you lots of new functionality. Paulo has added new Image functionality, support for Type3 fonts and fixed some problems concerning AcroForms. Mark has been fixing some RTF bugs, posted on the mailing-list.
I on the other hand, have signed a contract with Manning Publications just a few weeks ago. I have started writing a book called 'iText in Action'. While writing I'll try to clean up the code here and there (mostly in the XML area), so keep posted!
best regards,
Bruno

Hello all,
I would like to inform you about the 1.3.1 release of iText. Of course there are a lot of new goodies and bugfixes: you can now use PdfReader with low memory usage, hyphenation has been made easier by switching from .hyp files to XML, we even fixed some Table bugs,... iText 1.3.1 also brings some experiments with new classes SimpleTable and SimpleCell and a new Parser. You can use them on your own risk and we are very eager to hear if they are interesting enough to keep in the next stable release 1.4.
I would also want to draw your attention to the new SourceForge regulations ( http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?group_id=1&docid=4297 ). It will no longer be possible to download files from http://itext.sourceforge.net/downloads/
As a matter of fact, I migrated almost everything that was on the SourceForge servers to the lowagie.com server. You may not notice this, because I used a 301 Redirect in the .htaccess file, but if you are experiencing trouble finding some page, please let me know. Also if you still have links to itext.sourceforge.net, please change them to the itextdocs.lowagie.com equivalent.
Remark that the directories with source code and extra jars are no longer browsable. The extra jars that were put on the filesystem rather carelessly in the past, are now in a separate package in the file release section: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15255&package_id=151860
I haven't had the time to check and double check all these changes, so please bear with me and let me know if I overlooked something.
best regards,
Bruno

Everybody on the internet knows Adobe as the inventor of PDF, but unfortunately Adobe is nowhere on the servermarket. MacroMedia on the other hand has a more than interesting server product: Cold Fusion. The combination of both technologies looks very promising.

But wait a minute! Weren't you able to produce PDF documents with Cold Fusion? Of course you were: ColdFusion is shipped with the iText.jar (iText, a free Java-PDF library hosted on SourceForge).... read more

You all know iText, the free Java Pdf library that allows you to generate PDF and RTF files just the way you want to. Version 1.2 was released on january the 6th and we are proud to present the third maintenance release: iText1.2.3.
This release brings you mainly bugfixes. Mark Hall solved some RTF problems; Paulo Soares improved AcroField functionality, added the posibility to add additional actions to PdfStamper and solved some bugs that were reported on the mailing-list.
Enjoy!

iText 1.2.2 has been released!
iText is a library that allows developers to extend the capabilities of their web server applications with dynamic PDF and RTF document generation (Java, J2EE, Servlets,...).
iText 1.2.2 fixes some bugs in the area of PdfGraphics2D (which allows you to draw directly to PDF from a java.awt.Graphics2D object), PdfReader/PdfStamper (which allow you to read an existing PDF and add content) and Image (transparency in a PNG image).
There is a serious performance improvement when using Type 1 fonts and some new features were added, such as support for Type 1 fonts described by *.pfm and PdfStamper.insertPage().

iText is a library that allows developers to extend the capabilities of their web server applications with dynamic PDF document generation.

If you look at the SourceForge homepage, it's as if news items only serve to announce a new releases. With this news item I hope to get your interest, not for the last iText release (that dates from january 11th), but for the release of some new and very interesting tutorial chapters.... read more