iText vs PDFBox

[Kristian Jones <kr...@hotmail.co.uk>]

Hi I am currently looking at toolkits that allow working with pdf documents in Java and I couldn't help notice that iText seems to do everything that PDFBox is looking to accomplish. Why are the PDFBox team looking at duplicating this this functionality? 

Please reply directly I am not subscribed to the mailing lists.
Kris

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COSArray Not Currently supported

["Bradley V. Stone" <bv...@gmail.com>]

I recently got this error while tryingn to overlay two PDFs using the
Overlay method.

 java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: Layout pages with COSArray
currently not supported.
         at java.lang.Throwable.<init>(Throwable.java:195)
         at java.lang.Exception.<init>(Exception.java:41)
         at java.lang.RuntimeException.<init>(RuntimeException.java:43)
         at
java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException.<init>(UnsupportedOperationException
.java:35)
         at org.pdfbox.Overlay.collectLayoutPages(Overlay.java:282)
         at org.pdfbox.Overlay.overlay(Overlay.java:237)
         at org.pdfbox.Overlay.main(Overlay.java:128)
 Java program completed with exit code 1

I haven't encountered this before.. is it something to do with one of the
PDFs that's being used?

Bradley V. Stone
BVSTools, Inc.
BVSTools - www.bvstools.com
eRPG SDK - www.erpgsdk.com

Re: iText vs PDFBox

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch>]

Kris, please don't cross-post if it is not necessary. All developers are
expected to be on the users list, too.

I don't think iText and PDFBox do the exactly same thing. Both have
different strengths. PDFBox, for example, can display and print PDFs
which iText can't. It also has a strong focus on text extraction. But
iText, on the other side, is probably stronger when it comes to
creating new PDFs. I'm sure there are other details where the two differ.
One difference is certainly the license.

So you can't really say that PDFBox is duplicating iText functionality.
Different projects, different focus, different project rules/philosphy,
different licenses. I personally find PDFBox more interesting than iText
for what I use it for. But everyone has to find out for himself which
is a better fit. And a little healthy competition is never bad. :-)

On 22.02.2009 13:00:11 Kristian Jones wrote:
> 
> Hi I am currently looking at toolkits that allow working with pdf
> documents in Java and I couldn't help notice that iText seems to do
> everything that PDFBox is looking to accomplish. Why are the PDFBox
> team looking at duplicating this this functionality? 
> 
> Please reply directly I am not subscribed to the mailing lists.
> Kris
> 



Jeremias Maerki