Our history

We release iText 9.0, our second major version release as part of the Apryse family. iText 9 introduces support for ISO/TS 32003 (AES-GCM encryption) and ISO/TS 32003 (MAC integrity protection), along with a comprehensive digital signature and certificate validation API. We've also streamlined PDF/A and PDF/UA creation and conformance, and improved PDF/UA signing.

All in all, Text enables enhanced security, integrity, and accessibility for your document workflows.

iText joins the Apryse family. Apryse takes document solutions to the next level, making work better and life simpler. As a global leader in document processing technology, Apryse gives developers, enterprise customers, and small businesses the tools they need to reach their document goals faster and easier. Our product portfolio includes Apryse SDK, Fluent, iText, and XODO. Apryse technology works with all major platforms and a wide variety of unique file types. For more information, visit Apryse.com

We release iText 8, with built-in FIPS and the latest ISO cryptographic standards support, even easier digital signing and forms creation, and much more!

iText joins the PDFTron group. The addition of iText’s unmatched high-performance and feature-rich PDF libraries positions PDFTron as the top technology provider for software developers and end users of document processing solutions, and further accelerates the company’s growth. iText’s expertise in server-side processing is highly complementary to PDFTron’s technology platform.

iText grows its product portfolio to keep serving its users and customers with robust and new functionality in the space of PDF technology and digital document management software: version 7 of the iText Suite, the latest version of our renowned PDF SDK, expands with the pdfOptimizer and pdfOffice add-ons.

As we enter a new era of sustained maturity and growth, iText grows its leadership team with the addition of several new executive appointments. In order to facilitate the growth in the US, we relocate from Somerville to a larger office space in Boston. 

iText celebrates its anniversary: 20 years of iText code. The entire iText team assembles for their annual All Hands on the sunny island of Tenerife, Spain two decades after the first public release of iText, 14th February 2000. 

Two new add-ons for the iText Core PDF library are launched: pdfRender & pdfOCR .

We also announce our new and improved iText Demo Lab, with online apps demonstrating iText functionality together with embedded compiler sandboxes.

The Singapore team moves offices in Singapore, and now operates from Republic Plaza in Raffles Place.

Alongside version 7 of our leading PDF library iText Suite, iText launches a new product: iText DITO, a low-code enabler for PDF generation.

iText DITO is a high-convenience document generation engine that combines WYSIWYG browser-based template design with an SDK built to handle enterprise-level requirements and volumes.

iText opens an office in Seoul, Korea, and founds Software Korea (ISK). In Belgium, the headquarters move to state-of-the-art facilities in the Technology Park in Zwijnaarde, Ghent. We are in good company with the many international technology start-ups, scale-ups but also multinationals that are located there.

Crescendo Equity Partners acquires the majority of iText shares.

We are given a seat on the PDF Association's Board of Directors, marking our recognition as an industry leader, and an established expert in the PDF space.

We continue to innovate: launching three new add-ons to our PDF library, namely pdfHTML, pdfXFA (replacing XFA Worker) and pdf2Data.

As iText's employee base grows, our office space in several countries becomes too small. The US team relocates within Boston to Medford Street, Somerville, and the team in Singapore now works from Fraser Street.

A new version of iText is launched, iText Core version 7. This release is a complete redesign and rewrite to overcome technical limitations of the previous version, and to make it more future-proof, easier to maintain and more intuitive to use. We retired the iTextSharp branding, with the Java and .NET releases now unified under the iText Core name.

Together with this release some new add-ons to the PDF library are introduced, which enable extra functionality: pdfCalligraph and pdfSweep.

The iText codebase moves to GitHub, and we launch the XFA Worker add-on.

In order to be closer to our Asian customers, we open an office in Singapore, and found iText Software Asia Pte Ltd (ISA). The US team changes offices in Boston: we can now be found in 3rd Street, Cambridge in Massachusetts.

Hancom, a South Korean tech company, and STIC Investments, a South Korean private equity firm invest in iText.

We unveil a new iText logo. The logo symbolises the building blocks we provide to developers that need to digitalize their document workflows: our libraries are the building blocks developers use for that purpose. 

In Belgium, we move from Zinniastraat, Ghent to an office building in De Punt, Gentbrugge.

The second iText Summit is organized in Cologne, Germany. 

We're granted our first patent, while we receive two awards: Deloitte chooses iText as the Fastest Growing Technology Company in Belgium. We already ranked #3 in 2013 and we will rank #2 in 2015. We also receive the title “Most Promising Company of the Year” from BelCham. 

The US team relocates to the East Coast: a new office is opened in Cambridge, USA. 

1T3XT BVBA re-organizes as iText Group NV. With this entity, iText sets up a board of directors and an advisory board. The first board meeting takes place in December.

iText joins the PDF Association, an international collaboration of organizations and individuals promoting open standards-based electronic document implementations using PDF technology.

The first iText Summit is held in Ghent, Belgium.

We also receive our first support ticket in our Jira system, and we start answering questions on Stack Overflow.

iText is trademarked. The company iText Software BVBA (ISB) is established, resulting in founder Bruno Lowagie hiring the first employees in Belgium.

The development team moves to the iText "Dev Shack" in de Zinniastraat, Ghent.

The second edition of “iText in Action” is published. 

Bruno Lowagie quits his day job at the University of Ghent to focus full time on iText.

Our license changes from MPL/LGPL to AGPL.

We establish iText Software Corp (ISC).

To our eternal sadness, nobody saw the heart in the iText logo and so we adapt the logo to a shorter and simpler symbol.

A new version, iText 5.0.0 is released, alongside a .NET version in C# (iTextSharp).

1T3XT BVBA (later iText Group NV, ISG) is founded as the first iText company. This marks the beginning of iText as a commercial company. Andrew Binstock, a developer and author from Silicon Valley who had read Bruno Lowagie's book, proposes to work together, resulting in the first sale of an iText license to “The Hartford” an American insurance company.

Along with turning the project into a company, a new logo is needed. Bruno Lowagie wants to visualize the company name 1T3XT as "I heart iText", while also being easy to write down as a signature. Later on, he defines the logo as a series of Bézier curves. This logo is used for the foundation of 1T3XT.  

 

A new tool is launched, RUPS. This is a PDF diagnostic tool for reading and updating PDF syntax & debugging PDF code.

A new version of iText is launched, iText 2.0.0 

2007 is an important year in the history of iText, as it enables the foundations for iText as a company. That is triggered by several clients such as IBM, who want to use iText on their servers.

The online tutorial Bruno Lowagie wrote receives interest from several publishers, in particular from the American publishers O’Reilly who make him an offer to write a book version of his tutorial. However, at the time he doesn't feel ready for this.

A few months later, Manning offers him a book contract which he accepts, resulting in the publication of the first edition of “iText in Action – Creating and Manipulating PDF” (selling around 11,500 books by 2012).

The iText codebase moves to SourceForge.

Bruno Lowagie takes a few weeks of holidays in order to write an online tutorial for iText to answer many of the technical questions he received.

iText 1.0.0 is released, and iText's first logo makes its debut.

The logo comes about because Bruno Lowagie realizes that people are pronouncing iText incorrectly, and so to make it clearer, instead of the letter 'i', he uses an abstract symbol that looks like an eye.

Not satisfied with his PDF engine, Bruno Lowagie continues to work on it during his free time. The revised version now not only enables the creation of PDF documents, but also the manipulation of them.

He decides to release it as open source, and chooses the name "iText" to represent "interactive text".

The first public release is iText 0.30 on 14 February 2000.

Bruno Lowagie is working at the University of Ghent in Belgium (UGent) as a member of the administrative and technical department. Asked for a more user-friendly way to create student lists based on the grades in the system, he writes a web application. For the printing of the reports he decides to use PDF. As he cannot find a good software library for creating reports in PDF, he decides to write his own.

The result is a PDF engine that can be built into web applications and allows users to generate documents.