Welcome on the iText Documentation pages. On this site, you'll find all the information you need to get started with iText:
- a plethora of examples
- the FAQ
- the keywords list
- the Javadoc API information
- a new book about iText (under construction; not available for free)
If you have comments or suggestions, please visit the contact page at itextpdf.com.
Writing documentation about a software project that is very alive and to which new functionality is added frequently, is a work that is constantly under construction. You can reward the work that is done on the documentation by buying the book about iText.
back to main pagePDL stands for Page
Description Language. A PDL is a language that describes the appearance of a printed
page in a higher level than an actual output bitmap. An overlapping term is printer control
language, but it should not be confused as referring solely to Hewlett-Packard's PCL.
PostScript, one of the most noted page description languages, is a fully fledged
programming language, but many PDLs are not complete enough to be considered a
programming language.
PDF is a PDL, but NOT a programming language. In PDF, each page is descibed in a(t least one) separate stream. One of the strengths of PDF, is that the document doesn't need to be interpreted if you want a specific page. For instance: with Postscript or Word, you need to interpret the 9.998 previous pages if you want to get page 9,999 in a large document. In PDF you can go to page 9,999 immediately without having to interpret the preceding pages.
Once in a while people post the question "After merging two PDFs, I am seeing some unnecessary white space. How can I remove or filter these blank areas?" Asking a question like this, demonstrates a lack of understanding of PDF. In PDF you work with complete pages, it's not possible to "reflow" the content. If you concatenate two PDF documents with half a page of content, the end result is NOT a PDF with one full page. The end result is a PDF with two pages that are only half full (as they are only half full in the original PDFs).
Please read the FAQ entry about editing PDF for more info.