Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

At the end of my presentation at Zenika, I talked about the future of iText. What started as 5 ideas for 2011 are now 7 ideas. Some of those ideas involve months of development, others only involve a couple of weeks. These are the ideas I started with:

• We need a better HTMLWorker
• We should start working on XFA to PDF conversion
• What about Digital Signatures: PAdES, timestamps,...?
• I'd like an Eclipse plug-in for iText
• Can we create an iText port for Android?

I've posted the slides I used a Zenika (Paris, March 10, 2011) on SlideShare:

... is currently not accessible:

I like the fact that our office is housed in a 100+ year old villa, but once in a while, you experience some disadvantages. The beams that were used in the floor were completely rusty and the masonry of the arches was deteriorating fast. I hope we have a new floor soon, because I'm not working in ideal circumstances right now.

A mini-iText conference, an interview and a business dinner at Le Pré Catalan. Those were three days in Paris well spent. But now back to day-to-day business. Let's take a look at out mailbox...

Reminder:

A while ago, there was a call for iBoot team members. Today, we repeat this call, and we can also present the ideas that passed the first edition.

Two weeks are gone since the last top 5 and all I can say is "times flies". Let's not waste any more time and jump straight into this week's top 5:

1. Questions about manipulating existing PDFs in general.

For instance: Fields no longer editable after merging

I'm entangled in a very strange private discussion about freedom. It started with a seemingly simple question about iText on an itextpdf.com mail address, and now we're discussing about the food industry, weighing one freedom against another one.

Imagine that using software is like baking cookies. A free/open source cookie specialist, company A, distributes recipes that are free in the sense of the AGPL: everybody is allowed to bake those cookies, provided that the consumer gets the recipe along with the cookies.

Today my wife needed to fill out some forms for the Belgian Government. She filled out an HTML form, and needed to sign the content. This was done in an applet that had 4 buttons for 4 steps:

1. Download a PDF with the data filled out in the HTML form to check if everything is OK.
2. Sign the PDF using here eID.
3. Download the signed PDF to check if everything is OK. For some reason the PDF wasn't signed, but the data was OK.
4. Confirm that everything is OK, after which she received a mail with a link to the signed PDF and a status page.

We like the fact that we could perform all these operations in a completely paperless way.

I don't like February, because it's a month that shows a dip in every curve: less days = less hits, less visitors, less sales too. For instance: in January, we had 58,830 unique visitors; in February we only had 58,257 (which isn't bad at all: 99% of the result in only 90% of the days). The heart beat of the project also looks healthy:

In January, the record of average visitors a day of November 2010, was beaten by one unit: 3002 instead of 3001 visitors a day. This record was broken once more in February with an average of 3285 visits a day.