History

iText 0.30 - iText 0.99 (February 14, 2000 - May 1, 2003)

In 1998-1999, Bruno wrote his first PDF library, but if you wanted to use it, you needed to be a PDF specialist: you needed to know all about PDF syntax, PDF objects, PDF operators and operands. This library wasn't programmer-friendly.

Bruno wanted to create a library that allowed developers to create PDF without knowing anything about PDF syntax. That's why Bruno decided to throw away his first PDF library. In 2000, he wrote a new library from scratch in his free time.

Long before iProducts became popular, he chose the name iText^®. The first version that was released to the public was iText 0.30. It was hosted on Bruno's personal domain: lowagie.com.

In the summer of 2000, another developer joined the project: Paulo Soares. Soon Paulo became the co-developer of iText.

iText 1.00 - iText 1.4.8 (June 2003 - December 19th, 2006)

In three years time iText had been gaining more and more popularity. Unfortunately, due to an altered situation at work, Bruno wasn't able to spend time on iText from May 2003 till November 2004.

In 2004 however, Bruno took some time off from his day job and he started writing a free online tutorial; as a result, Manning Publications offered him a Book contract in 2005. After 3 months of preparation, 6 months of writing and 9 months making the manuscript ready for publication, the first copies of the book left the presses in December 2006.

iText 2.0.0 - iText 2.0.8 (February 15, 2007 - December 19, 2007)

In 2006-2007, Actuate Corporation asked Bruno Lowagie to perform an IP review. The result of this research was that the Eclipse Foundation accepted iText for distribution with Eclipse Europa, mentioning Bruno Lowagie and Paulo Soares as the authors of the software. Actuate and Eclipse use a special 1.5.x branch of iText (not listed here). iText 1.5.0 and 2.0.0 were the first versions of iText of which the IP was checked for 100%. Starting with iText 2.1, there's a strict policy for contributors and contributions.

The major changes that were introduced are code clean ups that should make it easier for other developers to join the project. A major code reorganization was gradually introduced. The core iText code was separated from the RTF package. The Swing GUI known as the iText toolbox was temporarily moved to a separate project. A new tool, called RUPS, was introduced.

iText 2.1.0 - 2.1.7 (March 27, 2008 - July, 2009)

The most visible change in 2.1 is the fact that the RTF package is separated from the main iText.jar. There's also plenty of new RTF functionality involving the reuse existing RTF files.

Making iText a more professional library than it already is, is one of the goals of the 2.1.x releases as the library is backed by a company in Europe (1T3XT BVBA) and a company in the US (iText Software Corp) since 2008.

iText 5.0.0 - iText 5.0.6 (December 7, 2009 - February 4, 2011)

We're jumping from iText 2.x.y to 5.0.0 for the following reasons:

• We want to use the same version number for iText and iTextSharp.
• From now on, the iText.jar is compiled using Java 5 (instead of with the JDK 1.4).
• The F/OSS license has been upgraded from MPL/LGPL to AGPL.
• The package names have changed from com.lowagie to com.itextpdf.
• The toolbox and RTF support have been removed: they are now in a separate project at SourceForge.

Note that because of the change of the package names, you can't upgrade to iText 5 without changing your code. Before upgrading to this new version, please read the new Terms of Use.

iText^® 5.1.0 - 5.1.3 (May 6, 2011 - November 11, 2011)

From iText 5.1.0 on, we're releasing iText as a zip file containing several jars. The most important jars in the zip file are the core itextpdf jar and a jar with interesting extra functionality for special use (embedding rich media, geospatial PDF,...). The other jars contain the source code and the Javadoc information.

Furthermore, we've created two new projects on SourceForge. Aside from the core library, we now also have iText RUPS (formerly part of the iText project) and iText XMLWorker (which is a complete rewrite of the XML and HTML functionality). Each of these projects has its own release cycle and jars.

Also new in iText 5.1 is the "Mavenization"; we've moved from ANT scripts to Maven POMs. iText will now by published in the central Maven repository.

Finally, we've replaced classes such as HashMap, ArrayList,... with interfaces such as Map, List,... in several places. You may have to recompile your own code to make iText 5.1.x work.

iText^® 5.2.0 - ... (February 29, 2012 - ...)

We switch from 5.1 to 5.2 because you may need to make some minor changes to your existing code if you decide to upgrade. CJK functionality has undergone major changes, so you'll need to replace the itext-asian.jar with a new version. We've also made iText Android/GAE-ready by moving some of the AWT functionality to a separate com.itext.awt package.

You'll also notice major improvements in the PDF parsing functionality as well as in XML Worker regarding HTML parsing. iText 5.2.0 is the first version with (experimental) SVG parsing.

iText^® 5.3.0 - 5.3.5 (June 20, 2012 - February 14, 2013)

We switch from 5.2 to 5.3 because we've done a major internal upgrade with respect to security-related functionality (encryption and digital signatures). The previous version uses version 1.46 of the third party library "BouncyCastle". We've now upgraded to BouncyCastle 1.47. As the API of BouncyCastle has drastically been changed, we had to rewrite parts of the internal iText code. If you upgrade to iText 5.3.x, you'll also need to upgrade to BouncyCastle 1.47. Depending on how heavily you depend on BouncyCastle, you may have to change some of your own (BouncyCastle-related) code for digital signing.

iText^® 5.4.0 - ... (February 14, 2013 - ...)

The 5.3 releases brought plenty of new functionality related to digital signatures. There is still some work that needs to be done on the digsig front, but now we've started working on better PDF/A and PDF/UA support.
We're also planning better support for ligatures, so that iText will finally support Indic languages.