iText

iText®

Developer(s)	iText Group NV
Stable release	5.5.7 / September 18, 2015 (2015-09-18)
Written in	Java, C#
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Library
License	AGPLv3[1] Proprietary
Website	http://itextpdf.com/

iText is an open source library for creating and manipulating PDF files in Java.

iText was written by Bruno Lowagie, Paulo Soares and others, and as of version 5.0.0 (released Dec 7, 2009) is distributed under the Affero General Public License version 3. Previous versions of iText (Java up to 2.1.7 and C# up to 4.1.6) were distributed under the Mozilla Public License or the LGPL. iText is also available through a proprietary license, distributed by iText Software Corp.

iText provides support for most advanced PDF features such as PKI-based signatures, 40-bit and 128-bit encryption, color correction, Tagged PDF, PDF forms (AcroForms), PDF/X, color management via ICC profiles and barcodes, and is used by several products and services, including Eclipse BIRT, Jasper Reports, Red Hat JBoss Seam, Windward Reports, and pdftk.^[2]

History

iText (formerly rugPdf) was developed by Bruno Lowagie in the winter of 1998 as in-house project at Ghent University to create a PDF documents application for the student administration. Preliminary versions lacked most modern functionality, initially only featuring the ability to read and write PDF files, and required developers to be knowledgeable of PDF syntax, objects, operators and operands to work with the library. Leonard Rosenthol, PDF Architect at Adobe, lists iText as one of the early milestones in the history of openness of PDF.^[3]

In 1999, Lowagie threw away the rugPdf code and wrote a new library, iText, from scratch. Lowagie created iText as a library that Java developers could use to create PDF documents without knowing PDF syntax, and released it as a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) product on February 14, 2000. In the summer of 2000, Paulo Soares joined the project and is now considered one of the main developers.

In late 2008, iText became available for proprietary license, and in early 2009 iText Software Corp. was formed to be the worldwide licensor of iText products.^[4]

iText has since been ported to the .NET Framework under the name iTextSharp, written in C#. While it has a separate codebase, it is synchronized to the main iText release schedule.

ISO standards support

iText adheres to most modern day PDF standards, including:

• ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7)
• ISO 19005 (PDF/A)^[5]
• ISO 14289 (PDF/UA)^[6]

Watch PDF and Standards,^[7] a talk by Adobe's PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol at the iText Summit in 2012.

Licensing

iText was originally released under the MPL/LGPL. At the end of 2009, with the release of iText 5, the license was switched to the Affero General Public License v3. Projects that did not want to provide their source code could either purchase a commercial license to iText 5 or continue using previous versions of iText under the Affero license.^[8][9] Along with the change, Lowagie warned^[10] that versions prior to 5 may have included code that was not legally licensed under the LGPL, leaving closed-source users of previous versions liable for copyright infringement as the AGPL license is not compatible with the GPL license, but an AGPL library can be linked to a GPL program.

iText is a registered trademark by iText Group NV.

Awards

In 2007, SOA World Magazine listed iText as one of the ten Open Source solutions enterprises should be using.^[11] James Gosling praised the iText library, using it in a new edition of Huckster.^[12] The New York Times also used iText to create PDF versions of their public domain articles.^[13]

In 2011, iText was featured on Devoxx (The Java community conference).^[14]

In 2013, Deloitte nominated the iText Software Group for the Technology Fast 50 Award in the Benelux. The company was ranked 10th in the Benelux and Third in Belgium.^{[15][16][17][18]}

In 2014, iText won the BelCham Entrepreneurship Award in the category "Most Promising Company of the Year"^[19] and Deloitte recognized iText Group NV as the fastest growing technology company in Belgium.^[20] Subsequently, the company was ranked #28 in Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 in the EMEA region.^[21] iText was also featured on the PDF Days in Cologne, Washington DC en New York, on Java One in San Francisco, on Devoxx in Antwerp, and many other events.

Further reading

• Lowagie, Bruno (Summer 2010). iText in Action (2nd ed.). Manning Publications. p. 600. ISBN 978-1-935182-61-0. 
• Lowagie, Bruno (8 December 2006). iText in Action (1st ed.). Manning Publications. p. 656. ISBN 1-932394-79-6. 
• Review first edition on JavaLobby by Stephen Kitt
• Review second edition in Freies Magazin by Michael Niedermair
• PDF Generation Made Easy by Benoy Jose
• Tools of the Trade, Part 1: Creating PDF documents with iText by Jeff Friesen (Adobe Press)
• Dynamically Creating PDFs in a Web Application by Sean C. Sullivan

See also

• List of PDF software

References

External links

• Official website
• iText on GitHub
• iTextSharp on GitHub
• iText on StackOverflow
• iTextSharp on StackOverflow
• Support forum for asking IText related question
• iText Java Tutorials