Apache PDFBox and FontBox 1.0.0 released

The Apache PDFBox project has announce the release of version 1.0.0 of PDFBox and FontBox. PDFBox is a Java library which allows for the creation and manipulation of PDF files and supports the extraction of content from documents. PDFBox also includes a number of command line utilities for the encrypting, decrypting, text extraction and conversion of PDF files. FontBox is a component of PDFBox which allows low level font data to be extracted from font files. Although developed as part of PDFBox, it is an independent library.

The PDFBox project was started by Ben Litchfield in 2002 as a way of extracting PDF content so that it could be indexed by the Lucene search engine. In 2006, discussions began with the Apache FOP developers about collaborating on a PDF library. Apache PDFBox is the result of that collaboration. PDFBox 1.0.0 and FontBox 1.0.0 now both require Java 5 as a minimum. Changes from previous release include support for Adobe CFF/Type2 fonts and a switch from Ant to Maven as a build system. PDFBox itself also has "numerous performance improvements" and aded support for page labels. Release notes for PDFBox and FontBox are available and the libraries can be downloaded, in source or binary form, from the project's download page.

(djwm)