Here at iText, we like to make a habit of kickstarting the year with a first quarterly release of the iText 7 Suite. iText 7.2.1 is the latest release of your favorite PDF library for Java and .NET, and the first scheduled maintenance release for iText 7.2. We are very excited to announce that pdfOffice, our add-on for high-quality native conversion of MS Office documents, now also supports Excel spreadsheets as input. When it comes to the iText 7 Core library, we’ve continued to improve on its SVG capabilities, as well as a number of other important improvements and bugfixes.
As always, we try to synchronize the release with those of our iText 7 add-ons. So, besides iText 7 Core, be sure to also check out the improvements below for pdfHTML, pdfOCR, pdfOffice, pdfOptimizer, pdfRender and RUPS.
iText 7 Suite Releases
iText Core 7.2.1
This new version of the beating heart of our PDF suite brings further improvements for SVG conversion, supporting default values for the d attribute of the path tag and improving PDF output, which in previous versions could be rendered incorrectly by some PDF viewers such as Safari and View (macOS) and Documents (iOS). Please see the release-related examples to get to get a full insight on these changes.
As for PDF merging functionality, we should note it has more intelligent outline handling, which is no longer as strict and can fix some syntax mistakes in the Outlines hierarchy. For instance, absence of the parent attribute which is mandatory in the PDF specification is not an issue anymore.
As for the rest of the changes, you can expect a number of bugfixes, plus some significant improvements to the codebase. we've provided some examples to give you more insight and demonstrate use cases.
pdfHTML 4.0.1
The pdfHTML 4.0.1 release is the first release of our HTML to PDF creation add-on in 2022.
This release of our add-on for PDF creation from HTML templates of brings better processing of SVG format, thanks to improvements to the SVG module in the iText 7 Core library. SVG support remains a very important focus for us, as we are moving toward comprehensive support of the SVG standard in the iText7 Suite.
In this release we have also incapsulated all resource handling functionality into the ResourceRetriever class. Now you can be sure that full control of Outbound connections is in your hands.
pdfOCR 2.0.1
iText pdfOCR offers Optical Character Recognition functionality to convert your scanned documents, PDFs and images into fully ISO-compliant PDF or PDF/A-3u that have accessible text.
This maintenance release updates the underlying glue (tess4j) with Tesseract to 4.5.5. There is not much to write home about, but we want to keep track of these underlying version updates so we are ready for when bigger changes come about.
pdfOffice 2.0.1
Although only a minor release, pdfOffice 2.0.1 brings some significant new functionality. It raises the bar for Office document conversion to a new level by introducing support for Excel spreadsheets to go along with the existing Word and PowerPoint conversion.
An example is worth a thousand words, so make sure that you check out our new Excel to PDF example.
As for the rest of the changes, expect a few bug fixes and a reduction in size for the resulting PDF documents.
pdfOptimizer 2.0.1
pdfOptimizer allows developers to easily optimize PDFs with fine-grained control over various optimization options. The pdfOptimizer 2.0.1 release includes a small yet important improvement. It will now notify you in cases when processing can break the PDF/A-1 compatibility.
In the future, we will extend the PDF/A-1 standard support in pdfOptimizer. Of course, we will keep you updated as and when this occurs.
pdfRender 2.0.1
For the latest release of the iText add-on that lets you render PDF to images, we have updated to a new version of Jpedal which brings a number of bug fixes.
In particular, Unicode text rendering has been improved in this release, and an issue with inline image rendering related to a combination of full and shorthand property names has been resolved, giving you a better PDF rendering experience. The latter improvement was made in response to the discovery made by DARPA’s SafeDocs researchers as reported in the PDF Association’s blog on the topic.
RUPS 7.2.1
We always release our PDF debugging tool RUPS together with iText 7 Core, as it is one of the most important dependencies (so all the goodies in Core also make their way into RUPS).
Happy debugging!
Shout-out to our contributors
We'd like to thank the iText community for its contributions, specifically; realityone, with a really important and impactful fix for incompatibility with PDF standards in our codebase and kohler, whose PR helped us a lot in our efforts to process PDF outlines better. We are happy to see that after 21 years there is still so much interest in improving the iText library.
We always welcome contributions and pull requests from the community. If you have any, let us know.
More information on the iText Knowledge Base
Head over to our Knowledge Base for the full iText 7.2.1 release notes, and find more information, installation guides, examples, FAQs, and more!
