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 in two versions: the original Java version, and the C# port, iTextSharp. These libraries make it possible for you to enhance applications with dynamic PDF solutions. You can use iText to create invoices for your customers if you have a web shop, to produce tickets if you work for an airline or railway company, and so on. You can integrate iText into an application to generate PDF documents as an alternative to printing on paper, to add digital signatures to a document, to split or concatenate different documents, and so forth.