iText Core/Community is a high-performance, battle-tested library that allows you to create, adapt, inspect and maintain PDF documents, allowing you to add PDF functionality to your software projects with ease. It is also available for .NET (C#) .
- Core library:
- PDF creation with the use of our layout engine
- PDF manipulation, e.g. merging multiple PDFs into one, adding new content, ...
- PDF digital signing
- PDF form creation and manipulation
- Working with PDF/A documents
- Working with PDF/UA documents
- FIPS-compliant cryptography
- Barcode generation
- SVG support
- Addons:
- Converting XML/HTML & CSS to PDF repo, info
- Redacting sensitive information in PDF documents repo, info
- Support for international character sets (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Thai, ...) info
- Optimize PDF documents for reduced file size, and increased performance info
- Flattening XFA documents info
- PDF debugging repo, info
Want to discover what's possible? Head over to our Demo Lab! It contains a collection of demo applications ready to use online!
The easiest way to get started is to use Maven, just add the following entries to your pom.xml file:
<properties>
<itext.version>8.0.2</itext.version>
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.itextpdf</groupId>
<artifactId>itext-core</artifactId>
<version>${itext.version}</version>
<type>pom</type>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.itextpdf</groupId>
<artifactId>bouncy-castle-adapter</artifactId>
<version>${itext.version}</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>For more advanced use cases, please refer to the Installation guidelines. You can also build iText Community from source.
The following example shows how easy it is to create a simple PDF document:
package com.itextpdf.hellopdf;
import com.itextpdf.kernel.pdf.PdfDocument;
import com.itextpdf.kernel.pdf.PdfWriter;
import com.itextpdf.layout.Document;
import com.itextpdf.layout.element.Paragraph;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
public class HelloPdfApp {
public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
try (Document document = new Document(new PdfDocument(new PdfWriter("./hello-pdf.pdf")))) {
document.add(new Paragraph("Hello PDF!"));
}
}
}This is a small subset of examples to get you started. For more advanced examples, refer to our Knowledge Base or the following links: Examples repo, Signing examples.
Some of the output PDF files will be incorrectly displayed by the GitHub previewer, so be sure to download them to see the correct results.
| Description | Link |
|---|---|
| Basic layout | |
| Change text properties | Java, PDF |
| Creating a simple table | Java, PDF |
| Add an image to a PDF document | Java, PDF |
| Create a list | Java, PDF |
| Add a watermark | Java, PDF |
| Add links to navigate within a document | Java, PDF |
| Create a popup annotation | Java, PDF |
| Change font | Java |
| Add form fields | Java |
| General document settings | |
| Change page size and margin | Java, PDF |
| Write PDF to byte array instead of to disk | Java |
| Change page rotation | Java, PDF |
| Add header and footer | Java, PDF |
| Merge documents | Java, PDF |
| Flatten annotations | Java |
| PDF/UA, PDF/A | |
| Create PDF/UA document | Java, PDF |
| Create PDF/A-3 document | Java |
| FIPS | |
| Enable FIPS | Java |
| FIPS SHA3 example | Java |
| Convert HTML and CSS to PDF | Link to repo |
| Convert simple HTML doc to PDF | Java |
| Secure redaction of content | Link to repo |
| Redacting content | Java |
| Redact based on regex | Java |
| Support complex writing systems | Link to docs |
| Add Arabic text | Java , PDF |
| Optimizing PDFs | Link to docs |
| Reduce size of PDF | Java |
| XFA flattening | Link to docs |
| Flatten an XFA document | Java |
| RUPS | Link to repo |
| Debug a PDF | Java |
Check out the iText Knowledge Base for the iText Jump-start tutorial and other tutorials, FAQs and more. For specific information and examples relating to digital signatures and iText, make sure to check the Digital Signatures Hub.
Many common questions have already been answered on Stack Overflow, so make sure to also check there.
Many people have contributed to iText Core/Community over the years. If you've found a bug, a mistake in documentation, or have a hot new feature you want to implement, we welcome your contributions.
Small changes or fixes can be submitted as a Pull Request, while for major changes we request you contact us at community@apryse.com so we can better coordinate our efforts and prevent duplication of work.
Please read our Contribution Guidelines for details on code submissions, coding rules, and more.
iText is dual licensed as AGPL/Commercial software.
AGPL is a free / open source software license.
This doesn't mean the software is gratis!
Buying a license is mandatory as soon as you develop commercial activities distributing the iText software inside your product or deploying it on a network without disclosing the source code of your own applications under the AGPL license. These activities include:
- offering paid services to customers as an ASP
- serving PDFs on the fly in the cloud or in a web application
- shipping iText with a closed source product
Contact sales for more info.