History
The library was developed by Bruno Lowagie in the winter of 1998 as in-house project at Ghent University to create a PDF documents application for the student administration. The library (formerly known as rugPdf) was a very small and complex library with minimum functionality, such as simply reading and writing PDF files. The developer had to be knowledgeable of PDF syntax, objects, operators and operands to work with the library.
In 1999, Lowagie threw away the rugPdf code and wrote a new library, iText, from scratch. Lowagie created iText as a library that Java developers can use to create PDF documents without knowing PDF syntax, and released it as a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) product on February 14, 2000. In the summer of 2000, Paulo Soares joined the project and is now one of the main developers of new iText features.
In 2006, a first book was published "iText in Action, Creating and Manipulating PDF", of which more than 11,000 copies were sold.
iText is embedded in many products and services, including Eclipse BIRT, Jasper Reports, Red Hat JBoss Seam, Windward Reports, pdftk, and others.
In late 2008, iText became available for proprietary license; and in early 2009 iText Software Corp. was formed to be the worldwide licensor of iText products.
At the end of 2009, iText version 5 was released under the Affero General Public License v3. The AGPLv3 differs considerably from the license under which previous versions of iText had been distributed, specifying that any application using iText 5 under AGPLv3 must provide their users with the full source of their application. Projects that do not want to provide their source code may either purchase a commercial license to iText 5 for an undisclosed price or continue using previous versions of iText under the more liberal license without any changes.
In 2010, the second edition of the book "iText in Action" was released. It was a complete rewrite with new examples.
Read more about this topic: IText
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