Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

The white paper on digital signatures can be downloaded from itextpdf.com but isn't 'counted' by Google Analytics. The URL is actually a redirect, and the redirect stores the date and time of the download, as well as referer information (if available). In October, the white paper has been downloaded 840 times!

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.

Over the years, we've outlined a number of rules when using the free mailing list for support. As newbies aren't always aware of these rules, it's necessary to repeat them once in a while.

Last week, I did a dry-run presentation of my talk for W-JAX (Münich) and it took me 75 minutes to explain everything I wanted to explain about digital signatures in PDF. Now I've updated my slides:

Yesterday, I received a LinkedIn invitation from an iText user. I accepted the invitation and was pleasantly surprised when I read the description of his current job:

Apparently there were serious problems during the recent elections in Belgium. Why am I not surprised?

I'm seriously considering closing down the free iText mailing-list in favor of Stackoverflow.

My main problem with the free mailing-list: REALLY STUPID QUESTIONS. When we were kids, our teachers told us that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Now that we're grown up, we know that our teachers weren't always right.

We’ve been busy!
Michael, Paulo and I had about 125 conversations during 3 days.

What’s iText?
I must admit, 7 out of 10 people already knew iText. But for the ones who did not know us, we gave a brief corporate presentation, a quick functionality overview, and a link to some of our demo’s.
For PDF viewing, we kindly invited them to see our friends next door, and vica versa for PDF creation and manipulation. Having a “PDF corner” was a good marketing decision.

iText update
We showed people the improvements we made in xmlworker, XFA, and the android version. Signatures were revised to support PAdES, the new ETSI standard in digital signatures.

Technical questions
We were addressed to help on specific projects. Paulo Soares, co-developer of iText, at our booth, gave (free) expert advice that saved people time and money. They were of course very grateful. Some also wanted to come over and shake Bruno Lowagie’s hand. We told them he was busy finishing his whitepaper on digital signatures, and that they’d hear from him soon enough.

Duke loves iText: