2021 is here, and to kick the year off we present our first quarterly release of the iText 7 Suite. This includes version 7.1.14 of the open-source iText 7 Core PDF library, plus five other updates to the add-ons which comprise the Suite.
Don’t forget that you can use iText 7 Core and it’s open-source add-ons for free under the AGPL conditions. For use in a closed-source environment, or to use closed-source add-ons, you’ll need version 3.0.6 of the license key library and the appropriate license file.
Alternatively, if you’d like to try out the entire iText 7 Suite (which includes iText 7 Core and all the open and closed-source add-ons) you can get a free 30-day trial while keeping your IP safe under the terms of our commercial license.
There’s plenty to talk about in this release, so let’s get right into it.
iText 7 Suite Releases
iText 7.1.14 Core
iText 7.1.14 Core is the latest release of our Java and .NET PDF library. Continuing on from our recent releases we’ve further extended our SVG support, since this is an important focus for us.
The new release brings support for the <pattern> element (benefitting both Core and pdfHTML). This element is used to define a graphics object which can be "tiled" to cover an area. In addition, we also added the support of font-relative units for SVG and fixed the stroke-width processing within <use> tags.
We've also made improvements to PDF forms (or Acroforms) support: you can now define border styles as Beveled, Underline and Inset.
As usual, code examples demonstrating each of these changes are linked from the release page.
Finally, we’ve made a few changes to Core’s OpenType Font (OTF) processing which is especially important in the context of Japanese, Chinese and Korean languages. Previously OpenTypeFontTableReader.getLanguageRecord() only allowed fetching the default language system for a given script, which was not sufficient for CJK regional variant substitution. However, it's now possible to fetch OTF language records by tag.
pdfHTML 3.0.3
This release of pdfHTML brings many improvements for SVG processing. We are introducing the <pattern> element which is used to define a graphics object that can be "tiled" to cover an area, and the support of SVG defined in HTML. Previously when converting HTML code to PDF we supported either Base64 encoded images or images given by URL. Now, pdfHTML supports SVG images as direct input with the 'data:image/svg+xml' notation.
Besides this, font-relative units for the font-size property in a text element are now supported.
While we're on the subject, we added the support of word-wrap and word-break properties in CSS as well as target-counters and target-counter functions. These functions are crucial for generating cross-references (e.g., for a table of contents) within HTML documents.
You can refer to the examples linked from the release page to give you more insight and use cases.
pdf2Data 2.1.10
In this release, we've extended the list of available selectors to add the possibility to extract text by its color.
In addition, this version of pdf2Data brings a number of parsing logic improvements that give significantly better results in many use-cases. The two most important are advanced space character detection and further improvements to the field grouping that was recently introduced.
pdfRender 1.0.3
The third release of this add-on brings two new features:
- A new supported image format - WebP. This is a modern format employing both lossy and lossless compression, which typically produces smaller images than either PNG (for lossless images) or JPEG (for lossy images) at equivalent quality settings.
- Rendering images from password-protected PDFs (providing you know the password, of course).
pdfRender is currently only available for Java, however, since version 1.0.1 a CLI version is also available.
pdfXFA 2.0.9
There’s not much to announce for this release, however, we’ve fixed a bug relating to table flattening and improved the performance for certain use-cases.
Having said that, we'd also like to point you to an XFA-related blog post that may be interesting to you:
iText RUPS 7.1.14
We always update and release our PDF debugging tool together with iText 7 Core, so you can be certain that all the relevant goodies in Core also make their way into RUPS.
Happy debugging!
iText Knowledge Base: release notes
For full details on improvements, bug fixes, and installation details, head over to the release notes on the iText Knowledge Base.
We always welcome contributions to our code. If you have any, just let us know.
That’s all for now, and we’ll see you next time!
