Chapter 1. Introducing PDF and iText

This chapter covers

  • A summary of what will be presented in this book
  • Compiling and executing your first example
  • Learning the five steps in iText’s PDF creation process

Call me Bruno. About ten years ago—never mind how long precisely—I thought I’d create a small PDF library in Java and publish it as free and open source software (F/OSS). Little did I know that this would lead to my writing a whale of a book about the extensive functionality that has been added over the years.

That library was iText, and the book was titled iText in Action: Creating and Manipulating PDF (2007). Today, iText is the world’s leading F/OSS PDF library. It’s released under the Affero General Public License (AGPL) and is available ...

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