iText 2.1.0: iText Split into Different Jars

The release of iText 2.1.0 was announced for the end of February. It had to be a very joyful event, with a lot of promotion, a new site, and so on...

All this changed when Bruno Lowagie, the original developer and one of the current maintainers of iText, received some very bad news: his son was diagnosed with cancer (osteosarcoma). As a result a lot of plans for iText were postponed.

Fortunately, iText is the result of the work of a whole community of developers. The main change in iText 2.1.0 is the fact that iText is now split up over different jars:

• iText.jar contains the core functionality as we know it: PDF creation and manipulation. As announced a long time ago, the old RtfWriter class was removed in favor of RtfWriter2.
• The RTF code was moved to a separate jar: iText-rtf.jar. This new RTF jar also contains code that can be used for parsing existing RTF files. This is a very promising evolution, but for the moment this functionality isn't documented yet.
• Finally there's also the iText-rups.jar, a GUI that uses SUN's PDF Renderer for viewing and analyzing existing PDF documents. A PDF is rendered using SUN's library; at the same time, you can look inside the PDF (the PDF syntax with its objects, operators and operands).

In one of the next releases, there will probably also be a fourth jar: iText-toolbox.jar containing the toolbox that is now hosted on SourceForge as a separate project.

The 2.0.7 release was celebrated at Javalobby by means of an interview with Bruno Lowagie. Click here to read it.