Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

The end of the world year is near. With one month to go, let's look at the heartbeat of itextpdf.com in november

Do you see that dent near November 22nd? That's Thanksgiving. We'll see a similar dent between Christmas and New Year.

iText 5.3.4 and XML Worker 1.2.1 have been released! Read all about it in the changelogs.

Another month, another look at the heartbeat of itextpdf.com:

We haven't had a month as good as this since March. The numbers for July and August were predicable, but as strange as September was, as normal was October.

The technical roadmap for 2012 consisted of 4 goals:

1. Digital Signatures— Make iText ready for PAdES and PDF 2.0: done!
2. XML Forms Architecture— Add support to flatten dynamic forms created by Adobe LiveCycle: done!
3. Android— Make an Android port of iText that is better than the (barely legal) ports created by third parties: done!
4. Cloud— Make iText "Cloud-ready": done! (Some of our customers are using iText on GAE.)

Goal number 3 and goal number 4 were already presented at the iText Developer Summit in March.

The month of February was one day longer than usual, but two days shorter than the month of January. Nevertheless, we broke all records:

Even if we look at 2011, we never had as much page views, visits and absolute visitors in one month.

We announced a new iText release for March, but as 2012 is a leap year, we decided to release on February 29th. Otherwise we'd have to wait for another four years before we have the chance to release on such a special day.

The previous release was iText 5.1.3 (dated 11-11-11, another special day) and we've been working with iText 5.1.4-SNAPSHOT for a long time now, but eventually we decided not to release a version 5.1.4, but to skip to version 5.2.0.

I've had that much work lately, I completely forgot to take a look at January's iText Heartbeat on Google Analytics.

Looks fine to me ;-)

Last week, we received an apology from one of your customers. He apologized because you didn't inform him that you were using our open source PDF library, iText, for his project. You reminded us of that company in Belgium that kept on saying 'We're not using iText! We're not using iText! We would know if we used iText! We're not using iText!' Then we looked at our website's ranking of 'visits from Belgium' and we found out that the network of that company was in the top 10 (right after our valued customer Ghent University).

We weren't born yesterday, you know, please don't treat us as fools.

We've received the sales numbers of 11Q3 for iText in Action. Some people are still buying the first edition of which now 11,481 copies have been solved (26.5% ebooks; 73.5% paper books).
The second edition has almost gained the status of bestseller (you've written a bestseller if you've sold 5,000 copies). In four quarters, we've sold 4,914 copies of iText in Action, Second Edition (39.2% ebooks; 60.8% paper books).

On behalf of the complete iText staff, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to all iText users, and I wish to say thank you! 680,775 times to every single person who visited itextpdf.com in 2011. We've been working hard last year, and you are making it worthwile!


With more than 1.2M visits, good for more than 4.5M page views, we did more than 30% better than last year.