Imagine a publisher who wants to “stamp” his ebooks on the fly with the name

of the buyer (to discourage sharing). Such a publisher would (and we know one

who does) use iText for the task. Developers looking to enhance web- and other

applications with dynamic PDF document generation and/or manipulation will

find this book unique in content

and readability. Based on ongoing examples

that encourage learning “in action,” they will finally understand PDF and learn

how to build applications that produce professional, high-quality PDF

documents. While the basic functionality of iText is easy to acquire, this book

lowers the learning curve for more advanced functionality. It explains how to use

iText to create/manipulate PDF documents on-the-fly in one or more of the

following situations:

• Due to time or size, the PDF documents can’t be produced manually.

• The content of the document must be calculated or based on user input.

• The content needs to be customized or personalized.

• The PDF content needs to be served in a web environment.

• Documents are to be created in “batch process” mode.

All the examples are written in Java, but they can be easily adapted to .NET by

developers using one of the .NET ports: iTextSharp (C#) or iText.NET (#J).

While iText is a free Java library and the examples are written from the point of

view of the Java developer, nine out of ten examples can be run by .NET developers

without any changes.