6 key reasons why iText helps you cope with increased demand for digital document workflows

Reason 1: Gain precious time with consistency

Consistency avoids unnecessary complexity within your organization. One comprehensive PDF library for your high-volume document manipulations means one methodology of implementation across all your current platforms and dev teams. 

Less organizational silos, less dependencies, and less hassle when developers have to dive into existing projects and integrate themselves quickly. Running a consistent document processing flow relieves you from complexities and frees up time to focus on other important issues at hand.

As a member of the ISO committee for PDF specifications, iText understands the importance of standards compliance. iText software will always produce documents that are fully compliant with the PDF specifications, and you can be assured that the PDF handling in iText is of the highest quality. You’ll never have to worry about incompatibilities in your PDF documents.

Reason 2: Solve software sprawl by choosing the largest coverage

Choose a single software vendor for your document manipulation needs and stop team members from downloading, installing and using a wide array of different open source or closed source tools to achieve specific document processing tasks.

The modular structure of iText means you can cherry pick the features you need, when you need them. There’s no need for huge monolithic libraries resulting in bloated code and wasted resources. The iText 7 Core library has a comprehensive set of features built-in enabling most common PDF generation and manipulation tasks, while additional functionality is available as add-ons when you need specific features like HTML to PDF, OCR text recognition, etc.

Reason 3: Digital signatures relieve you from security concerns

PDF has been explicitly compatible with embedded electronic signatures for a very long time. Digital signatures can provide a range of valuable capabilities, from tamper protection to authentication and revocation. 

iText 7 Core provides development teams with all the functionality to achieve digital signing in high volume with the least amount of effort. Relieving you and your teams from worrying about digital signature specifications and PDF security.

 Reason 4: Build your document processes upon 20 years of open source heritage

Why? The codebase of iText is stable and mature, having recently passed the milestone of 20 years of constant development and improvements. Throughout its history, open source has been part of iText’s DNA, and its code has been thoroughly tested and implemented globally by the iText community of developers and users.

Enterprises increasingly prefer open source software vendors. Key decision-makers in major Fortune 500 companies have noticed the highest levels of software creativity and innovation often originate from open source community-driven initiatives.

Yet since iText offers dual licensing, those enterprises who are unable or unwilling to release their source code under the AGPL open source license can opt for commercial licensing to protect their IP, so their code remains closed and secure. While still benefiting from the 20 years of maturity inherent in iText.

The iText PDF library has evolved significantly over those 20 years, with the current iText 7 incorporating all the features and improvements we learned. iText 5 was a significant step forward from iText 2, adding support for more PDF standards, digital signatures, and an IP code review to ensure it was safe to use in corporate environments.

iText 2 users can and should upgrade to iText 5 or preferably iText 7. Even though upgrading from iText 2 to iText 7 will pose more issues, it does offer much more features, security improvements etc. and we strongly advise using iText 7 for new implementations.

iText 7 was a complete rewrite to allow for additional features like Unicode support, security improvements, improved digital signing capabilities with encryption and hashing, PDF 2.0 compliance while also being a leaner and more extendable library capable of meeting the needs of modern document workflows. 

Reason 5: Get things done without developers

Your functional analysts or business users in your organization often require development resources to get things done. Resources which are in such high demand slows down change and slows down innovation. Avoid your analysts needing to explain difficult to grasp business-oriented concepts to developers and vice versa.

Low code tools like iText DITO enable a minimum of developer intervention, so your business-oriented teams can independently initiate innovation and change.

Reason 6: Guaranteed legal warranty, support & updates

Whether open source (AGPL) or commercial license, there’s no difference in functionality or features for those iText products or add-ons which offer dual licensing.

Depending on your situation, you choose what’s best for your organization. Commercial license holders enjoy more extensive support, access to extra modules which are not open source, rapid response, active guidance and help from product and PDF experts. They also benefit from testing, predictable product life cycles, product roadmap access, early access to specific new features and finally commercial license holders protect their intellectual property.