The first plan to make a library like iText was conceived during the Christmas holidays in 1998. That was when Bruno Lowagie, the original developer of iText, read the PDF Reference for the first time. While he was reading the reference, Bruno developed a small library that allowed him to create PDF documents for an application for the student administration at Ghent University, formerly known as the (Rijks)Universiteit Gent (RUG), hence the name rugPdf.
One year later, Bruno decided to throw away the rugPdf code and he wrote a new library from scratch. If you wanted to use rugPdf, you needed to be a PDF specialist; you needed to know all about PDF syntax, PDF objects, PDF operators and operands. Bruno wanted to create a library that allowed developers to create PDF without knowing anything about PDF syntax.
At that time Bruno only had a temporary contract at the University, and as he wrote the new library in his own free time, he chose a new name: iText. To avoid confusion about the Intellectual Property of the code, he hosted the project on the lowagie.com domain (and used com.lowagie for the package names). This is documented in the report that concluded the Bruno's internship at the university and that gave him access to a contract of undetermined duration as an employee of Ghent University.
In the summer of 2000, another developer joined the project: Paulo Soares. Soon Paulo became the co-developer of iText.
- rugPdf 0.01 - rugPdf 0.25 (March 11th 1999 - December 8th, 1999)
- iText 0.30 - iText 0.39 (February 14th, 2000 - December, 2000)
- iText 0.40 - iText 0.70 (Spring, 2001 - October, 2001)
- iText 0.71 - iText 0.89 (December, 2001 - March 19, 2003)
- iText 0.90 - iText 0.99 (March 26, 2002 - May, 2003)
In three years time iText had been gaining more and more popularity. Unfortunately, due to an altered situation at work, Bruno wasn't able to spend time on iText from May 2003 till November 2004.
In 2004 however, Bruno took some time off from his day job and he started writing a free online tutorial; as a result, Manning Publications offered him a Book contract in 2005. After 3 months of preparation, 6 months of writing and 9 months making the manuscript ready for publication, the first copies of the book left the presses in December 2006.
- iText 1.00 - iText 1.02b (June 25, 2003 - February 7, 2004)
- iText 1.10 - iText 1.1.4 (November 16, 2004 - December 26, 2004)
- iText 1.2.0 - iText 1.2.4 (January 7, 2005 - March 21, 2005)
- iText 1.3.0 - iText 1.3.7 (April 6, 2005 - March 3, 2006)
- iText 1.4.1 - iText 1.4.8 (May 22, 2006 - December 19, 2006)
In 2006-2007, a research agreement between Actuate Corporation and Ghent University determined who owns the IP of iText (Bruno Lowagie and Paulo Soares). All other code contributors and contributions were listed in the acknowledgments and copyright notices. The result of this research was that the Eclipse Foundation accepted iText for distribution with Eclipse Europa. Actuate and Eclipse use a special 1.5.x branch of iText (not listed here). iText 1.5.0 and 2.0.0 were the first versions of iText of which the IP was checked for 100%. Starting with iText 2.1, there's a strict policy for contributors and contributions.
The major changes that were introduced are code clean ups that should make it easier for other developers to join the project. A major code reorganization was gradually introduced. The core iText code was separated from the RTF package. The Swing GUI known as the iText toolbox was temporarily moved to a separate project. A new tool, called RUPS, was introduced.
- iText 2.0.0 (February 15, 2007)
- iText 2.0.1 (March 7, 2007)
- iText 2.0.2 (April 13, 2007)
- iText 2.0.3 (May 25, 2007)
- iText 2.0.4 (June 4, 2007)
- iText 2.0.5 (September 9, 2007)
- iText 2.0.6 (October 5, 2007)
- iText 2.0.7 (November 28, 2007)
- iText 2.0.8 (January 25, 2008)
The 2.1 release was announced for February 2008, but then Bruno received the bad news that his oldest son (almost 12 years old) had cancer (osteosarcoma), so the release was postponed.
The most visible change in 2.1 is the fact that the RTF package is separated from the main iText.jar. There's also plenty of new RTF functionality involving the reuse existing RTF files.
Planned developments are somewhat compromised by Bruno's altered situation on the family front, but making iText a more professional library than it already is, is one of the goals of the 2.1.x releases.
