PDF text layout made easy with PDFBox-Layout
More than a decade ago I was using iText to create PDF documents from scratch. It was quite easy to use, and did all the stuff I needed like organizing text in paragraphs, performing word wrapping and marking up text with bold and italic. But once upon a time Bruno Lowagie - the developer of iText - switched from open source to a proprietary license for reasons I do understand . So when I now had to do some PDF processing for a new project, I was looking for an alternative. PDFBox is definitely the best open source choice, since it is quite mature.But when I was searching on how to do layout, I found a lot of people looking for exactly those features, and the common answer was: you have to do it on your own! Say what? Ouch. There must be someone out there, who already wrote that stuff... Sure there is, but google did not find him. So I started to write some simple word wrapping. And some simple pagination. And some simple markup for easy highlighting with bold an italic. Don't