Comment by nogridbag
2 days ago
I thought most were using Apache PDFBox these days. Anyone have any thoughts on how the two libraries compare in 2025? I'm particularly interested in programatic creation of PDFs.
I know historically PDFBox is a bit lower level whereas iText was a bit more user friendly, but that's not too big of a deal for me.
PDFBox is the GOAT of backend pdf libraries. We've built incredible things with it, plus pdfjs on the front-end - full compliant e-signature, templated pdf generation, in-browser pdf editing. Looked deeply at alternatives but very happy with our choice. In particular using itext vs pdfbox feels like using WordPress vs Rails - try to build anything very serious and you will be happier you picked the more capable, lower-level library.
I use PDFBox. There are some FOSS layout libraries you probably want to add one or more of, depending on your needs.
It's disgustingly fast and capable. In one project we crunched out 150k PDF documents in less than forty minutes from roughly 6 GB input data, on a mid laptop, including a fair bit of other file types related to those documents.
Fairly low level but not hard to get started with. You might have to wrap it in a module yourself if you're using those.
Thanks. I'm using it for a side project now and have my own layout library which I may consider open sourcing. I started to question if I made the wrong decision if OpenPDF had more momentum!
It's a fine decision. The degree of control you can have is a life saver sometimes, especially if you find you need to produce documents that adhere to specific PDF standards, or need to invent some customised layout element. Allows both the quick and dirty, and the very sophisticated.
You could use both if you want, I've done it in toy projects when evaluating.