The ABC of PDF with iText: PDF Syntax Essentials

iText is a Java library originally created by Bruno Lowagie which allows to create PDF, read PDF and manipulate them. This book will show how to create PDF files with iText.

This book is a vademecum for the author's other books entitled 'Create your PDFs with iText', 'Update your PDFs with iText', and 'Sign your PDFs with iText'.

In the past, we used to refer to ISO-32000 whenever somebody asked "why can't I use PDF as a format for editing documents" or whenever somebody wanted to use a feature that wasn't supported out-of-the-box.

Although it wasn't always our intention, answering "read the specs" was lethal for the conversation as the spec consists of more than a thousand pages. In this short book, I'd like to give a short introduction to the syntax of the Portable Document Format. It's not the definitive guide, but it should be sufficient to help you out when reading the other iText books.