Working on iText®

2011 Brought me a new challenge. Since February  I’ve been working on the iText® library, a library for creating PDF with Java (or C# ). This is quite a change, instead of working on products/sites/applications at the client sites, I’m now coding in-house in corporation with the founder of iText® and another colleague of mine.

Since iText seems to be the leading PDF library for Java this is an interesting project. Upon entering the project I introduced maven in it. ( I couldn’t resist the urge to mavenize)

Another one of the first tasks is to improve the XML to PDF part. That’s what we’ve been doing the last month an a half and it’s currently coming to a phase where we will release the code into the sourceforge project. Hopefully users will try out the Release Candidate of our XMLWorker. We’ll add it as a separate jar, a addition to iText® but with the same license.

The XMLWorker can process XML, but currently we mainly focussed on processing XHTML and CSS in a flow way so absolute positioning is not yet supported. Later on perhaps we build processing tools for docbook or other xml formats that exist. But there are also other tasks that are awaiting me like implementing new stuff that is added in the soon to come PDF 2.0 specifications.

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