I stopped using iText back when it changed licensing because the developer wanted his government to pay to use it (or something like that). What ever happened with that fiasco?
As the commenters above note, the "upgrade" to AGPL was both highly profitable to Lowagie and caused many to shift to an open-source fork.
IMO forks are the great leveler; if your brand strength and your ongoing investment in engineering + community make a license shift viable (and if you retain the trust of your contributors) then everybody wins... but if you make a license shift and just rest on your laurels, forks will destroy your value. I don't know enough about the history to know what happened in this case, but based on the successful exit, I imagine it's somewhere between these two extremes.
I thought most were using Apache PDFBox these days. Anyone have any thoughts on how the two libraries compare in 2025? I'm particularly interested in programatic creation of PDFs.
I know historically PDFBox is a bit lower level whereas iText was a bit more user friendly, but that's not too big of a deal for me.
PDFBox is the GOAT of backend pdf libraries. We've built incredible things with it, plus pdfjs on the front-end - full compliant e-signature, templated pdf generation, in-browser pdf editing. Looked deeply at alternatives but very happy with our choice. In particular using itext vs pdfbox feels like using WordPress vs Rails - try to build anything very serious and you will be happier you picked the more capable, lower-level library.
I use PDFBox. There are some FOSS layout libraries you probably want to add one or more of, depending on your needs.
It's disgustingly fast and capable. In one project we crunched out 150k PDF documents in less than forty minutes from roughly 6 GB input data, on a mid laptop, including a fair bit of other file types related to those documents.
Fairly low level but not hard to get started with. You might have to wrap it in a module yourself if you're using those.
Thanks. I'm using it for a side project now and have my own layout library which I may consider open sourcing. I started to question if I made the wrong decision if OpenPDF had more momentum!
It's a fine decision. The degree of control you can have is a life saver sometimes, especially if you find you need to produce documents that adhere to specific PDF standards, or need to invent some customised layout element. Allows both the quick and dirty, and the very sophisticated.
You could use both if you want, I've done it in toy projects when evaluating.
> Malty strong beers age well. Hoppy beers don't because the compounds are volatile.
> IPA's always taste off to me.
That sounds contradictory to what I've heard about IPAs: that they were created because the normal beers the British had at the time wouldn't survive the journey to India, so they added a lot more hops and called it India Pale Ale. Based on that, I'd expect them to age better, not worse, than other kinds, but I'm not a beer person and this is just secondhand knowledge that I've never bothered to verify.
The amount of hops in the beers from that story were about as bitter as a common blonde ale.
The modern IPA is nothing like that anymore. Also its the aroma compounds of hops that breaks down so fast, not the bittering aspects.This is why you can store a Russian imperial stout (high hop bitterness, low hop aroma, very high abv) but not normally a double/triple IPA (high hop bitterness, high hop aroma, high abv) and defiantly not age a normal IPA or session IPA (high hop aroma, low abv).
*Some overly malty double and triple IPAs will age into a nice barley wine if given enough time.
The hops are somewhat antibacterial, so they can help against contamination, but the hop flavors break down over time, and light and oxidation are what "skunk" a beer.
I've been using them for a little over a year for a daily medication. The price is less than half what the local pharmacies are charging - and that's without insurance.
