About this Book
This book will teach you about PDF, Adobe’s Portable Document Format, from a Java developer’s point of view. You’ll learn how to use iText in a Java/J2EE application to produce and manipulate PDF documents. Along the way, you’ll become acquainted with interesting PDF features and discover e-document functionality you may not have known about before.
This book is intended for Java developers who want to enhance their projects with dynamic PDF generation or manipulation. It assumes you have some background in Java programming.
This book includes lots of ready-made solutions that can easily be adapted and integrated into larger projects. For reasons of convenience, most of the examples are constructed as standalone command-line applications. If you want to run these examples in a web application, you should know how to set up an application server, where to put the necessary Java archive files (JARs) and resources, and how to deploy a servlet.
.NET developers using iTextSharp, the C# port of iText, can also benefit from this book, but they’ll have to adapt the examples.
Knowledge of the Portable Document Format isn’t necessary, because this book will explain a good deal of the PDF functionality and syntax where needed. ISO-32000-1 is a good companion to this book, for those who want to know every detail about PDF internals.