By joining MEAP, Manning's Early Access Program, you can read the book long before it's in stores. And your subscription comes with a free ebook of the previous edition! As the Bruno writes or revises each new chapter, you'll receive a note with the latest updates. Each download includes the complete manuscript including the newest version of each chapter. When the book is finished, you'll receive the final ebook edition. If you bought the print book with your MEAP subscription, it will be shipped to you automatically as soon as it arrives from the bindery.

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Read more about the first edition here:

Amazon rating:  (8 customer reviews)

Visit http://www.manning.com/lowagie/, and download two chapters for free:

• Chapter 1: iText, when and why
  This chapter contains screenshots of a series of interesting PDF files. As is done in some cookbooks, you get to see the end result first, then throughout the book, you learn all kinds of recipes to get to that result.
• Chapter 3: PDF, why and when
  This chapter is about PDF in general; it explains why PDF was 'invented', and lists different flavors of PDF.

The other chapters contain a plethora of small and not-so-small examples. I chose to provide the most 'theoretical' chapters of the book for free, because they form a nice introduction to both PDF and iText. They aren't as 'technical' as the other chapters in the book, so they can easily be read by people who don't know anything about Java or PDF development. In a company, people like that are often called 'decision makers' ;-)

Let them read these chapters and decide if your company should buy this book for you.

I've also made a more technical chapter, namely chapter 2 entitled "PDF engine jump-start", available for free for those who are willing to share their name, company and e-mail address with iText Software Corp. Please fill in the form and you'll receive a mail with a link allowing you to download the chapter.

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• "If you have any sort of need involving the creation of PDF files from within your own system, iText is a great alternative to explore. And if that seems to be the way to go, I don't know of any better book to get than this one..." --Tom "Duffbert" Duff on amazon.com
• "Each aspect is explained with numerous examples that can be applied to real-world problems right away." --Ulf Dittmer, JavaRanch
• "The book is an enjoyable read, with an easy style and few mistakes. Certainly if you're using or evaluating iText you should read it, or at least have it handy to dip into relevant sections as you require various features. Readers curious about PDF will also learn a lot; iText in Action's main purpose may be to describe iText, but along the way it also describes PDF in great detail. You'll probably discover a few PDF features you didn't know about - enough perhaps to suggest new uses for PDF and iText in your projects!" --Stephen Kitt, JavaLobby
• "While the iText Web site has remarkably good documentation on it, the best place to get the information you need is in a newly released book, "iText In Action" from Manning Publications, a publisher of consistently high-quality niche books. This volume is no exception, and it makes a topic that will surely be foreign to many users entirely approachable." --Andrew Binstock, SD Times
• "[Bruno Lowagie] made every effort to explain things as clearly as possible, and to document the pitfalls as well as the attractive features. It is evidently a labor of love for him." --Mark A. Barton on amazon.com
• "any developer that is making serious use of iText would be a fool not to buy this book." --Dave Gilbert, jfree.org
• "Thorough and complete ... will be a long running, valuable resource for iText and PDF." --Alan Dennis, Software Architect, MyFamily.com
• "One of the best technical books I have ever read! Great work!" --Oliver Zeigermann Technical Trainer, CoreMedia AG
• "I wholeheartedly recommend it." --Doug James, eReporting Team Lead, Benefitfocus.com, Inc.
• "Impressive! It provides depth without all the noise." --Justin Lee President, Antwerkz Inc.
• "Valuable to any developer using PDF." --Stuart Caborn Consultant, Thoughtworks

Say you need a tool to add dynamic or interactive features to a PDF file and you decide to search on Google for "Java PDF". What do you think you'd find? Why, at the top of the page you'd find "iText," of course. A leading tool for programmatic creation and manipulation of PDF documents, iText is an open source Java library developed and maintained by Bruno Lowagie, the author of this book, with the help of many contributors.

While at the entry level iText is easy to learn, developers find they soon need its more advanced features. Written by the master himself, iText in Action now offers an introduction and a practical guide to the subject--you will gain a sound understanding of the Portable Document Format and how to do interesting and useful things with PDF using iText.

iText in Action introduces iText and lowers the learning curve to its advanced features. Its numerous, valuable examples unlock many of the secrets hidden in Adobe's PDF Reference. The examples are in Java but they can be easily adapted to .NET using one of iText's .NET ports: iTextSharp (C#) or iText.NET (J#).

What's Inside

How to
• Serve PDF to a browser
• Generate dynamic documents from XML files or databases
• Use PDF's many interactive features
• Add bookmarks, page numbers, watermarks, etc.
• Split, concatenate, and manipulate PDF pages
• Automate filling out of PDF forms
• Add digital signatures to a PDF file
• And much more

Bruno Lowagie is the original developer and one of the current maintainers of iText. He works for Ghent University and lives in Ghent, Belgium with his wife and two sons.

PDF is the file format of choice whenever a document must preserve its structure and layout. This comprehensive guide to PDF generation and manipulation with the iText library will be a valuable long-term resource for those interested in understanding and working with PDFs. It is the only book about iText, written by one of the creators of this popular tool.

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.

This books 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.

You can find an overview of all the examples that are discussed in the book (and even some extra examples that aren't in the book) on the 1T3XT.info-site.