Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

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.

A couple of months ago, we announced a new product in an interview on Dzone. Today, we are proud to present a first demo:

You can try this demo for yourself on http://demo.itextsupport.com/xfademo/ using your own files or some of the files that were used in the video.

It's as if everybody wants to have a quick look at the iText site before the holidays:

In November, we broke the record of average visits a day (4091) and of the absolute unique visitors a month (67,707). We figure our presence at Devoxx might have something to do with that.

We were happy to see so many people dropping by our booth to talk to us and to have a glance at our power demo’s on digital signatures, iText on Android, XML worker, AcroForms vs. XFAforms, and PDF on the web: SaaS solutions.

Out of our booth visitors, 8 winners were drawn and receive a free copy of the book "iText in Action, 2nd Edition" by Bruno Lowagie.

November was a month with two holidays: All-Saints and Thanksgiving. You can see both holidays on last month's analytics graph:

But what about the rest of the month?