Q3 of 2023 is here, and so is a new release of your favorite open-source PDF library for Java and .NET: iText Core version 8.0.1! Following the big announcement of the release of iText Suite version 8.0 in Q2, you might not expect much from a simple patch release. However, our devs have been hard at work and so we have quite a few nice things to talk about. Let’s dive in!
iText Core version 8.0.1
There’s a neat feature for the sign module, to follow on from the improvements introduced in version 8.0. We’ve introduced algorithm agnostic signing/validation so if you wish you can now make use of algorithms not directly supported by iText, but which are supported by the underlying Bouncy Castle cryptographic library.
Note that for FIPS 140-2 this is also supported for the Java bc-fips version of the library, but not currently by the .NET version. By the way, if you use algorithms not specifically supported by the PDF specification, iText will output a warning to let you know.
There are some additions in the layout module for CSS flex-wrap and flex-direction for pdfHTML to use, and for the forms module there’s an improvement to optimize PdfFormField regeneration handling.
We’ve also made a number of improvements to the font-asian module, such as improved Unicode support for "HeiseiMin-W3" and "UniJIS-UCS2-H" fonts and other text encoding improvements.
pdfCalligraph 4.0.1
pdfCalligraph is our iText Core add-on which provides advanced typography support when creating PDF documents, enabling you to expand your document workflow with accurate rendering for global languages and writing systems.
This 4.0.1 release of pdfCalligraph fixes a potential thread deadlock issue that was identified.
pdfHTML 5.0.1
pdfHTML is an iText Core add-on for Java and .NET to create PDF from HTML/XML (and associated CSS).
For the pdfHTML 5.0.1 release we’ve focused on CSS improvements such as support for more flex-related properties like flex-wrap and flex-direction. We’ve also introduced multi-column support to enable you to more easily layout and render text in multiple columns, for example like in newspapers. Currently implemented are the column-count, column-height, column-width, column-style, and column-color properties, with support for more properties coming soon. We recommend you read the documentation for the layout module (Java/.NET) to learn more about our multi-column support.
pdfXFA 4.0.1
pdfXFA is an iText Core add-on for Java and C# (.NET) that allows you to flatten dynamic XFA forms to static PDF. It also enables you to add a digital signature to converted XFA forms as additional security for further processing in PDF workflows or for archiving.
In this 4.0.1 release, we have resolved a bug where empty pages could be added to a document during the form flattening process.
That's all (for now!)
Spoiler alert: we're planning to have even more cool stuff for the release of version 8.0.2, so we'll see you in Q4.
Don’t forget, you can get a free 30-day trial of the entire iText Suite under the terms of our commercial license, which enables you to keep your intellectual property safe. Happy coding!
