14th February 2020... It’s a date which has been carved in the minds of our developers here at iText for several months now. And it’s not because it’s a day we want to spend with our loved ones at home. It’s because that’s the day the iText library, which we are working on daily, marks its 20th birthday: Feb 14, 2000 is the day when we released our first lines of code!

This was an important landmark for developers as it meant that from then on they could use PDF technology in the backend. Prior to that the technology resided within the Adobe environment.

Since 2020, the iText PDF library has evolved substantially, thanks to the many contributors in our community. Now, twenty years on, we’re at iText Core version 7.1.10!

However, it’s not just our code has that has changed… Our user base has grown substantially: today we have millions of users around the world, and our client base is still growing at an exponential rate.

iText also moved from being an open source hobby project to become a successful and financially stable open source company with employees spread over 5 offices worldwide! That means when you’re contacting us from anywhere in the world, someone at iText is awake to answer your question.

For those developers that like data, here’s an overview of the iText release history:



2000: iText 0.30 - first public release

2003: iText 1.0.0

2007: iText 2.0.0

2009: iText 5 - move to Java 5, license changed from MGPL/LGPL to AGPL

2016 - iText 7 - move to Java 7, complete rewrite to improve the API and support the upcoming PDF 2.0 specification, modular structure with support for dedicated add-ons for specific functionality: pdfInvoice, pdfSweep, pdfDebug, pdfCalligraph

2017: pdf2Data, pdfHTML and pdfXFA

2019: iText DITO release, iText’s template engine capable of generating a few hundred to a few hundred thousand PDF documents per day to meet any business needs

2020: pdfRender, and more to come

Over the years, we have moved our code from SourceForge to GitHub, and we saw thousands of iText related questions answered by the community on Stack Overflow.

Our expertise and knowledge have been recognized by the market: some of our technical experts are a member of the ISO committee for PDF. That means we help in writing and defining the PDF specification.

While we are eating birthday cake, we’re also thinking of you and want to give you some treats to join the celebrations. As a birthday gift to the developers out there iText 7.1.10 comes with a whole bunch of updates, including new versions of pdf2Data, pdfCalligraph, pdfHTML, pdfSweep, pdfXFA and RUPS. Head over to the release page to get an overview of the changes.

Keep an eye on our website and social media posts if you’re interested in finding out more about the iText history. We’ve got some stuff planned to keep up the momentum.

If you have any particular memories of iText, we’d love to hear about them: if you contributed to code, you saw us at an event, or you have a pair of the highly-in-demand iText socks… Let us know or send us your pictures. Send them to us via Twitter: tag @iText and use #iText20y.

We’re always keen to hear about your experiences with our technology.

