Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Today I received a mail asking me for advice about a PDF viewer: can you recommend a commercially accessable viewer? The guy wanted to develop a custom app viewer/editor and he added: Please understand that over half of the products I've tested fail big time.

This was what I answered: There are several reasons why we at iText have made the decision NOT to focus on developing a PDF viewer/editor, but the main reason is that we know what PDF is about.

Allow me to elaborate on this.

There's a clear set of rules if you want to post a question to the free mailing list. Last week, we've given you one reason. This is another one:

iText Software is looking for developers for its Belgian offices:

Your background
You're a Java/Java EE developer, and you're used to working with tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Jenkins. You don't know all frameworks in detail, but you know what Spring, Java Server Faces, Hibernate, and so on, are about. You'll know how to use them when needed.
Some knowledge about C# is a plus, but not a must.

Subject: Maintenance release of iText; change in architecture for XML Worker

iText 5.1.2

Recently somebody wrote that this page is misleading because it says:

If you have a technical question, and you want to get an answer for free, please subscribe and post your question to the mailing list.

His interpretation of this message was that everybody who posted a question on the list was entitled to a gratis answer. He gave an example of a question that received a well-documented explanation, whereas his own question received an answer that was perceived as inadequate and insufficient. (There are also examples of questions that don't receive an answer at all.)

Many people post questions to the iText mailing list. They follow the rules and subscribe. However, some people are confused by the fact that third party services also offer the possibility to post question. Nabble is one of these services.

Unfortunately, your mail doesn't reach the real mailing-list if you post a question on Nabble. This is clearly indicated in yellow:

I've received a new "Royalties" report with the numbers of iText in Action book sold up until March 31, 2011. It goes without saying that the sales of the first book have dropped dramatically in favor of the sales of the second book: 42 versus 524 in 11Q1.

Today is my birthday (41), and my wife doesn't want me to work much today. I don't know if blogging about the work that was done yesterday counts as work. Let's pretend it isn't.
It has been three weeks since I posted a development update. Back then, the word NOW was written in upper caps next to the topic XML Worker. We've released the first production-ready version of XML Worker last Wednesday. We'll continue working on XML Worker, but we've reduced the priority of this project because we're now awaiting user feedback. The whiteboard shows what we'll be doing next:

iText^® XML Worker is no longer in beta. You can now start using XML Worker 1.0.0 in a production environment to create PDF files using HTML created using CKEditor or TinyMCE as input. We're simultaneously releasing iText 5.1.1 because XML Worker 1.0.0 depends on some new functionality that was added to iText.

For a full overview of what has changed, please consult the changelog.

Those who missed my talk about iText at Devoxx, also missed a cool demo about Geomajas, but no problem: why not test the demo yourself?