Library to create and manipulate PDF documents in Java and C#. Use this tag for code using iText versions up to 5.5.x. For iText versions from 7.0.0 onwards a separate tag "itext7" is available. Remember to also add the tag for the language you're using.
iText is a library that allows you to create and manipulate PDF documents. It enables developers looking to enhance web- and other applications with dynamic PDF document generation and/or manipulation. Developers can use iText to:
- Serve PDF documents to a browser
- Generate dynamic documents from XML files or databases
- Use PDF's many interactive features
- Add bookmarks, page numbers, watermarks, etc.
- Split, concatenate, and manipulate PDF pages
- Automate filling out of PDF forms
- Add digital signatures to a PDF file
Typically, iText is used in projects that have one of the following requirements:
- The content isn't available in advance: it's calculated based on user input or real-time database information.
- The PDF files can't be produced manually due to the massive volume of content: a large number of pages or documents.
- Documents need to be created in unattended mode, in a batch process.
- The content needs to be customized or personalized; for instance, the name of the end user has to be stamped on a number of pages.
Often you'll encounter these requirements in web applications, where content needs to be served dynamically to a browser. Normally, you'd serve this information in the form of HTML, but for some documents, PDF is preferred over HTML for better printing quality, for identical presentation on a variety of platforms, for security reasons, or to reduce the file size.
iText is available in Java as well as in C#.
Official website: https://itextpdf.com/
Useful links
Important
All versions prior to iText 5 (released in December 2009) are obsolete. Commercial and AGPL licenses for iText5 are available from iText Group. According to them, older versions should no longer be used due to technical and legal issues (read the Legal section in The Best iText Questions on StackOverflow for their opinion).
About iText 4
When you look at the Change logs, you can see that iText 2.1.7 was released on July 7, 2009. It was followed by iText 5.0.0 on December 7, 2009. There was no official release of iText 3 or 4. As explained on the official web site, iText jumped from version 2.1.7 to 5.0.0 to synchronize the version numbers of iText and iTextSharp. iTextSharp was already at version 4 while iText was still on version 2.
iText 7
As iText version 7 is a complete rewrite of the API, an additional tag itext7 has been introduced to mark questions explicitly referring to iText 7 usage.
