iText PDF Library turns 25

They're now owned by "copyright trolls".

They hit up a company I know because their web-crawler found a PDF that someone generated using their library over a decade ago.

https://beemanmuchmore.com/software-licensing-trolls-apryse-...

I'd avoid it.

> When using iText Core/Community under AGPL, you must prominently mention iText and include the iText copyright and AGPL license in output file metadata, and also retain the producer line in every PDF that is created or manipulated using iText.

https://itextpdf.com/how-buy/AGPLv3-license

Not really AGPL, they just advertise AGPL and mean something else. Avoid.

OpenPDF is a fork of iText with Lgpl and Mpl license: https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF

I stopped using iText back when it changed licensing because the developer wanted his government to pay to use it (or something like that). What ever happened with that fiasco?

I have used their RUPS tool for a while, and it's been great for inspecting the underlying PDF structure.

I recently used Okular (KDE linux application) to annotate a PDF, the interface to add text was clunky, not inline. Is there a better app available for linux? It uses the poppler library as its back end:

https://poppler.freedesktop.org/

If I recall correctly, earlier versions of iText lived on in Linux distributions as part of pdftk, until that became unbuildable because it had a hard dependency on GCJ: the command-line parser was written in C++ for some reason.

Most previous users of pdftk have probably migrated to qpdf by now.

Libraries like iText would be SO good with LLM/vision model integration and vice-versa. Huge opportunity to use these tools to generate more training data based from siloed PDFs.

pdfbox is just as good for 99.9999% of documents. We used to use iText and in the last renewal, they tried to 10x our yearly license cost to the point it would have been more expensive than our AWS bill. No thanks.