Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

About a month ago, I was in München, presenting What's new in PDF 2.0 regarding digital signatures. The people attending my talk, had to fill out a form, giving me a score from one to five: 1=excellent, 2=good, 3=fair, 4=unsatisfactory, 5=inadequate.

This is my score:

Gisteren heb ik wat geëxperimenteerd met Leanpub. Ik had erover gelezen bij iStoire en ik wilde er eens mee experimenteren om te zien of ik het platform kan gebruiken voor mijn technische boeken.

About a month ago, I wrote that the white paper on digital signatures had been downloaded 840 times in October. I now have the numbers for November: 835 times! That's a very consistent number of downloads ;-)

Ik loop de laatste dagen nogal nors rond. Sommigen vinden dat terecht, anderen vinden dat onterecht. Er zijn inderdaad een aantal evoluties die helemaal de goede richting uitgaan. Laat me beginnen met wat het leven zoet maakt:

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.

I remember endless discussions about using <div> instead of <table> in HTML. At some point, I decided not to waste any more energy on this matter and to continued to work with <table>, <tr> and <td> tags. Then suddenly I received this question by mail:

As a matter of curiosity, can I ask why a lot of the formatting that is supported is focused on table elements instead of the more widely used elements such as div?

In spite of my promise to myself not to discuss this anymore, I answered with the major argument against <div> as a replacement for <table>:

For some reason this question depresses me:

Do you want the real answer? Lowagie is a passionate developer, and iText is his creation. Many people love Lowagie for the work he has done, but even more people don't care, and just take his work for granted. They don't even know he's a human being.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the following question on Stackoverflow.

Source code of iTextSharp
I am creating a tool to convert webpage data to PDF.
How do I convert the html code to pdf without using iTextSharp or any external refrences?? I am not allowed to add any other reference libraryreferences?
Can anybody provide itextsharp code?

This question is stupid for many reasons.

After a long train ride, we arrived in Munich, and our sales guy immediately started building the booth:



Afterwards, there was a reception and a whisky-tasting opportunity:

We didn't drink much whisky though. We mostly drank water and a little bit of wine.