iText Core/Community 7.2.5

Happy 2023 everyone! Thanks to our regular quarterly release schedule, the start of a new year also means you can expect a new release of your favorite open-source PDF library: iText Core 7.2.5!

That's not all though, since if you read our blog you'll know that a brand-new version of iText is in the works. iText 8 is coming, and our development team are hard at work adding new features and revising the API to make it even more intuitive for developers. You can learn about some of the things we have planned in our release blog, but customers can get a sneak-peak by checking out the 8.0 snapshots from our Artifactory. Things could still break or change in the API before release though, so be warned!

As for iText Core 7.2.5 though we've still got plenty of neat stuff to talk about, so let's get right into it.

A change in the way documents are opened means you should see a significant performance increase when opening or processing PDFs. In addition, we’ve improved Core’s resilience when dealing with PDFs with incorrect or malformed cross reference (xref) tables. Previous versions would already do a pretty good job of rebuilding invalid xrefs when opening a document. However, issues could still be encountered when a trailer containing references to an object was located before the actual object’s location, for example in linearized PDFs with corrupted xrefs. Cases like these should now be resolved.

The wrapping of text elements inside Paragraph objects has been improved to fix problems with spaces at the beginning or end of lines. See the example linked below for more information.

Support for TIFF images has been updated and extended to include more CCITT compression types. Images using the T.4 compression standard are now supported in Core.

Finally, a bug relating to merging documents has been resolved. In previous versions, layers with identical names would be discarded when merging with useSmartMode(), even when the layers were assigned to different pages in the document.