Apache Project Releases PDF Tools

by Joe Brockmeier - Feb. 18, 2010Comments (0)

When I think about the Apache Software Foundation, I usually think of the flagship project and serving Web pages, but there's a lot more going on over at the ASF besides the ubiquitous HTTP Server. Case in point, the project recently released PDFBox 1.0, a Java library for working with PDF documents.

The PDFBox project comprises PDFBox, FontBox, and JempBox, all available under the Apache License (of course).

PDFBox makes it possible to create and work with PDFs. This includes pulling content from PDFs, working with existing docs, and generating new documents. PDFBox can merge PDFs, integrates with the Lucene search, create PDFs from text or create images out of PDFs, and a lot more. In addition, PDFBox has several command line utilities that are available as Java apps or Windows binaries.

The project is used by an impressive number of downstream projects, including Alfresco, Liferay Portal, OpenCms and a bunch of others. Several changes come up in the 1.0.0 release, most notably the support for Adobe CFF/Type2 fonts, ability to work with encrypted files, and use of Java 5.

To get started with PDFBox, check the Developer's Guide. If Java isn't your thing, there's also a .NET version available created with the IKVM JVM for .NET and Mono.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a freelance writer and editor with more than 10 years covering IT. Formerly the openSUSE Community Manager for Novell, Brockmeier has written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, Linux Pro Magazine, IBM developerWorks, Linux.com, CIO.com, Linux Weekly News, ZDNet, and many other publications. You can reach Zonker at jzb@zonker.net and follow him on Twitter.