Blog articles

How to use a new open-source API from BFO to digitally sign using a key hosted remotely managed by a vendor supporting the Cloud Signature Consortium

A release announcement for a new PDF Library and Report Generator, which now supports the jakarta.servlet package.

This is the PDF/UA-2 release, and it also adds code for converting PDF to HTML. Read on for details.

Release 2.28.3 of our PDF Library adds per-separation rendering for output preview, Factur-X, Document Parts and more.

Creating a bitmap image from a PDF is normally done in RGB, but when that PDF contains overprinting or depends on CMYK blending, you need something more. This article tells you how.

The first update to BFO Publisher for 2023 adds some new features.

Release 2.28.2 of our PDF Library adds a lot of under-the-hood changes to support the upcoming PDF/UA-2 profile.

Our last release, only ten days ago, broke applying a timestamp with Digital Signatures. This is a fix.

A minor security issue has been discovered and fixed in this release, and signatures have had a lot of improvements.

GlobalSign have updated their digital signing service and now offer qualified signatures. We show you how to integrate this with our PDF library.

An article on the oddities of dates in PDF.

A slightly overdue announcement of BFO PDF Library 2.27.2, which introduces the "Arlington Model": a vendor-neutral validation model for PDF.

Details on the latest release of our PDF Library, which has many fixes and improvements for PDF/A

Our first completely new product in 20 years, we're finally able to tell you about it

Details on the latest release of our PDF Library, and the Report Generator build with it. This is the "certified with Java 17" release.,

Everyone is asking us about Log4J. Here's a quick statement.

Details on the latest release of our PDF Library, and the Report Generator build with it. This is the "certified with Java 17" release.,

We've been running our PDF/A conversion tools across some large Corpora. Here's what we've learned in the process.

Coming two months after one of our major releases, the 2.26.1 release has seen a large number of small changes based on testing on tens of thousands of documents. But we think the one you're going to notice is the improvements to logging. Read on for more detail.

The advantages of using Webswing to run PDF Viewer via a standard web browser

Converting PDF to PDF/A has always been possible with our API, but we largely left our customers to choose their own approach. Release 2.26 changes that - we now have a very powerful new API for conversion.

Our latest PDF Library release includes a lot of new functionality. Here's a summary, other articles will follow with details.

A quick note on signing PDFs with the Amazon CloudHSM

A quick summary of some of the new features in the PDF library in the latest release.

A quick summary of some of the new features in the PDF library in the last six months. Again.

A quick summary of some of the new features in the PDF library in the last six months.

Built on our new PDF Library release, the latest Report Generator can easily create valid PDF/UA Documents.

The new release of our PDF Library has completely rewritten support for the Structure Tree, required for PDF/UA. While mainly to support the addition of PDF/UA to the Report Generator, if you're working with Tagged PDF this release has lots for you.

Why policy decisions by Adobe are damaging trust in PDF digital signatures

An updated version of the article we wrote 8 years ago, exploring how to create digital signatures with our API that are automatically approved by Acrobat: this time, with an EU Identity card

Release 2.23.2 adds a fix for a largely theoretical attack on PDF digital signatures, specifically the way they are verified with our API.

Details on the recent 2.23 release of the PDF Library, and on where we are with Java version support

This one has been a while cooking, because it includes a JPEG2000 decoder and a rewritten Indic layout engine

This article shows how to add support for JPEG2000 image decoding to the PDF Library.hi (updated for 2018)

GlobalSign have recently launched a digital signing service, and in this article we show you how to integrate this with our PDF library.

In the unlikely event you wish to make pages larger them 25m², here'a s quick primer on how to do it with the latest release.

Changes include a reengineered text layout engine, updated internal Unicode model to version 10.0 and OpenType font parser to 1.8. GlobalSignDSS class added to create signatures that work with GlobalSign's digital signing service.

Some details on our latest PDF Library release

We've turned our PDF/A verification code into a public service, which you can use to compare our results to other testers.

Our latest release contains updates, support for non-standard form fields and the usual minor array of bug fixes.

A mere 11 years after it was introduced, we have finally noticed an incompatible change in the PDF417 barcode specification.

In our latest update we've added several new features and created fixes for some unsual issues.

Our latest 2.20 release of the PDF Library adds full support for the creation of PDF/UA compliant documents, and hopefully this article will shed a little light on what they are.

Our latest update includes several new features and fixes for some obscure problems.

Our latest release includes several new features, such as supporting PDF/UA standards.

Our second image extraction article, this time using a java webapp.

The first of two articles demonstrating how to extract bitmap images from PDFs using the BFO PDF Library API.

Europe's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer celebrate tenth anniversary deploying the BFO PDF Library Extended.

Our latest release includes some basic bug fixes.

A few simple examples for how to merge PDFs with the BFO PDF Library.

How to format text with the LayoutBox class.

At long last, our new website has been released. Same address but new content coming soon.

One of the main new features in release 2.18.2 of our PDF Library was support for "Long Term Validation" of signatures. The purpose of these isn't immediately clear - read on for details.

Swiss software house hails BFO for having the most stable support and cleanest API in the Java PDF market.

We detail the major new change in 2.18, the OutputProfiler class

BFO have just released a new update to their PDF Library, the first for a few months. Here we describe a few features that are in the new release in a bit more detail. Integrating Logging messages with the viewer Our logging framework is a thin wrapper around whichever of Log4J or java.util.logging is configured, which means it's essentially a functional interface. Lo...

German based software developers use BFOs PDF Library, Viewer & Report Generator to satisfy customer requirements.

Here are a couple of examples of highlighting & redacting text with the BFO PDF Viewer.

Our major new release has been several months coming - here's why.

How to extract text from a PDF using BFO's PDF Library API. We will show you with code examples how it can be done.

It's been 4 months since our last PDF API release, what does it have in store? Besides changes to the page list, there are two major new areas: PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3 support has been added The Swing classes now support linearized loading New PDF/A revisions We're seeing more and more companies adopt ISO 19005, aka PDF/A, and we're pleased to have added support fo...

You released 2.14.1 of your PDF API yesterday, and today there's a 2.15. What are you people playing at? Read on, we'll explain.

Swedish company valuations leader creates valuation reports for clients with the BFO Report Generator and BFO Graph Library.

Long term PDF/A archiving for the Austrian Notaries Chamber, thanks to cyberDOC and BFO.

There are many situations where a PDF has to be "rasterized" - the contents of each page turned into a bitmap image - such as when a PDF is being converted to PDF/A and the page contents cannot be repaired. This article shows how to do it efficiently.

ObjectiveIT develops an insurance tariff comparison solution for their insurance broker clients with the Report Generator.

We've put out our first PDF library in 5 months, and although there are a lot of small changes there are very few headline grabbers. Perhaps the most interesting is the ability to restrict operations in the viewer with permissions - here we go into that framework in a little more detail.

We've been getting a few emails asking about the new "pdf.js" viewer in Firefox, and why some of our documents don't render correctly in that viewer. Read on to find out why.

This challenge was too good to resist. We've neglected to make our cards PDF/A compliant, which you are welcome to interpret as a commentary on the impermanence of romantic love, or perhaps it would have just taken longer to do. Either way we hope you had a happy Hallmark day. The code is below, and if you want to generate your own cards for someone you love (or even someone you don't) you ca...

The "P" in PDF stands for "Portable", and PDF is now an ISO Specification. So you could be forgiven for being surprised when you learn about XFA. We're asked about it a lot so what follows is a bit of a FAQ. What is XFA XFA stands for "XML Forms Architecture", and it's been part of Acrobat since Acrobat 6. It's an XML syntax which defines the document (the whole document, not just the fo...

This article shows how you can create a custom viewer feature that duplicates the functionality of Acrobat's "Print with Comments Summary" feature.

Yesterday we released our first PDF Library for a few months, version 2.12, so it's a good to give a bit of a summary of the changes

Client adopts BFO's customizable Java PDF Viewer for their project.

We've recently released version 2.11.25 - here's a quick summary of some of the features.

Acrobat added dynamically updated barcode fields in Acrobat 7, but they haven't been documented until now, in the upcoming PDF 2.0 specification. This article shows you how to use them to make data extraction from printed forms a lot easier.

A new feature in 2.11.25 of the PDF Library is the ability to capture handwritten signatures from an iPad, iPhone or Android tablet. Useful? Maybe not, but it is kinda neat as you can see in the video.

We've covered them before, but Applets - a technology launched in 1996 with Java 1.0 - just keep changing. What follows is the definitive, step-by-step guide to compiling our viewer as an Applet useful as of mid-2012.

Benevity, a micro-donation platform, implements BFOs Java Report Generator to create PDF receipts and invoices on the fly.

Usually on this blog we cover details of things you can do with our PDF API, so it's a bit of a departure to cover something we can't. Read on to learn about Reader Extensions and the limitations they imply.

We've just released 2.11.24 of our PDF Library which has our latest round of bugfixes and improvements. Download it from the the usual location

UK University Integrates BFO's Java PDF Library.

How to use the new OpenType layout features in the PDF Library and Report Generator.

Printing PDFs is easy with the Java PDF API. In this article we go through the Java Print API at a high level, then guide you through the details in case things go wrong.

Create PDF/A-1b documents using BFOs Report Generator.

When working with Java APIs that use native code you can hit an OutOfMemory in the PermGen space due to weaknesses in Java's garbage collectors. Here's an ugly little hack that might help.

How to extract text from a PDF in Java? Using our API of course!

In the second part of our "extending the viewer" series, we show you how to go all the way - we create a new "Custom Stamp" feature, then show you how to compile it, bundle it with the Jar than prepare the Jar in the most efficient way for applet delivery.

The Report Generator has got a few new tricks in release 1.1.51. Graph Library integration, Flash, PDF sets and Xinclude - read on for a summary and some examples.

PDF/A is the ISO standard for the digital preservation and long term archiving of electronic documents. The ability to search documents, include digitial signatures and reduced file size is resulting in both Governments and corporations adopting the PDF/A standard.

PDF documents can contain JavaScript, which opens up all sorts of possibilities - not all of which are gaping security holes. Here's an article showing how to use it in PDF - both how to embed it from the Report Generator, and how to run it in the Viewer.

QNT Systemy Informatyczne is a leading manufacturer of software for government organizations in Poland. We develop software for accounting, payroll, human resources and many other fields.

Not all digital signatures are created equal. Our PDF Library has been able to digitally sign documents for years, but digitally signing a file with a key that's trusted by Acrobat is a little trickier, and requires hardware. Here, we show you how to do it.

The recent PDF Library 2.11.15 has a few highlights, including better support for digital signing from hardware, generation of "Aztec Code" barcodes, basic support for Flash file embedding in PDF, and a large number of bug fixes and improvements. This release offers improvements in memory and speed across the board, with tweaks to the low level data-structures that underly all PDFs. The Jar has shrunk by 10% as well, and our packed PDF Viewer Applet now scrapes in at just under 800KB.

A quick tip completely unrelated to PDF or Graphs: How to create a new self-signed X.509 Certificate with Java.

iDEA: intelligent Digital-Emotion Analyser. A search engine that extracts events from search results, producing a timeline of the main events associated with whatever that was searched; otherwise known as a "Emotion Timewave".

A computer scientist from Bath University is creating an Intelligent Digital-Emotion Analyser Library (iDEA) with functionality from the BFO Graph Library

Version 2.11.12 of the PDF Library and PDF Viewer fixes a small memory leak in the Viewer which could occur during text selection. Some new methods for working with the Adobe Highlight File Format have been included, along with a large number of minor bugfixes and improvements since the previous release in June.

Sometimes when you convert a PDF to TIFF, you're left with a lot of whitespace around the content of the page. This article shows an easy way to remove it.

The Report Generator is a layer on top of the PDF Library API which converts XML to PDF. The XML is much easier to work with, but there are always situations where you'll need the flexibility of the API. Here we show you how to do this, and we also present a neat and non-obvious technique for watermarking.

If you're deploying Java code as Applets, Pack 200 compression can reduce the size of your download by 70%. This article shows how to build digitally signed Jars with Pack 200 compression using Apache Ant. It can be applied to any code, not just BFO code.

The BFO PDF Viewer has a simple framework and API for adding new features. This article will show how to add a simple widget to the toolbar and then add more features that interact with the PDF document itself.

Most people when they think of protecting a PDF, think of a password. However this isn't the only way to do it. Both Acrobat and our PDF viewer allow a PDF to be decrypted using a private key which is specific to a user. In this article we show you how to create a key, encrypt a document for that key and then decrypt it again.

The traditional approach to using the BFO Graph Library in web pages has been to use the JSP tag library so that the server processes XML in JSP pages and replaces it with generated graphs. However if you want to include BFO graphs in non JSP web pages that use AJAX to load data dynamically then the tag library is not very useful. Although the Graph Library has a SOAP interface for web service access SOAP is not well suited to being used from web pages, so instead we will use the plain XML interface to the Graph Library to dynamically add charts to web pages.

The PDF Library supports a large number of barcodes, including QR-Code. This article shows some tricks you can do with these dense 2D barcodes.

We occasionally are asked how to print a PDF from a web browser without displaying a dialog. There isn't an easy answer to this, but you can get fairly close with our Viewer API.

The BFO PDF Library can create TIFF images from PDF using a number of compression algorithms, including Group 4. If for some reason you want to use Group 3 compression you'll need to use a third party library like JAI. This article shows you how.

The release of 2.11.6 of the BFO PDF library sees the introduction of a consolidated logging API that can be integrated into customer's existing logging systems. Read on to find out how to configure BFO products to log with Log4J or java.util.logging.

BFO Report Generator by default includes the BFO Graph Library, but the older version 1.0 library. While this is adequate for many users, people may want to use the new graphs and features available in version 2.0 of the Graph library. This article will show how to achieve this.

With the release of version 2.4 of the BFO Graph library it is now possible to create "funnel charts" This blog article will explain how to use the new chart type and provide examples of the different styles that can be created.

PDF/A is a standardised subset of PDF used for long-term archive storage. The PDF/A format ensures that documents can be correctly rendered hundreds of years from now in the absence of standard frameworks we take for granted today. Read more to find out how to author PDF/A documents with the BFO PDF library.

Reading and writing PDF documents to and from the same disk file can have unexpected consequences. This article covers what to watch out for if you do this, and details a few ways to get around the problems it can cause, including the new features added in 2.11.2 for this problem.

BFO have released a new version of their Java PDF Library. Version 2.11.2 fixes an issue with IBM versions of Java that was introduced in the previous release - a change of obfuscator clashed with a bug in some releases of the JRE supplied with Websphere. There are fixes for Customers reading and writing PDFs to the same File, a memory leak in the Viewer has been fixed, and a number of bugs have...

Sun have rewritten the Java browser plugin in Java 6 Update 10 to address many of the issues that people have experienced with deploying Java applets, and to add new features such as dragging applets out of the browser. We have updated the PDF Viewer Applet to take advantage of these features, and we'll show how you can update your own deployment of the PDF Viewer Applet, or any other applet, to do the same.

BFO have simultaneously released new versions of their Java PDF Library and Java Report Generator tools.

BFO are pleased to announce the 2.10.4 release of their PDF library. Several months in the making, it contains a large number of changes, mostly under the hood. For the end user, the primary new features will be the new single column display in the Viewer; improvements to allow the library to work with XFA-only PDFs and the addition of the new USPS "IntelligentMail" BarCode. There was also a larg...

Student uses Graph Library engine for visualization of statistical data in his informatics project.

BFO are pleased to add 4Point, the world's largest Adobe consulting practice, to its enviable client base. A spokesman for 4Point said, "We used (BFO's) PDF Library to meet our client's need for rich inter-document navigation. With (the) PDF Library we were able to stitch together flat PDFs, create a set of inter-document linking bookmarks, and hyperlink inter-documents via existing and built ta...

We're asked some questions more than others at BFO, and one of the most common concerns conversion of a PDF to a bitmap image format - typically TIFF, but sometimes JPEG or another format. This process is called "rasterization" and while it's very easy to do with the "extended plus viewer" version of our PDF Library, it's worth going over in more detail.

The 2.10.3 release of the PDF library adds support for writing "Linearized" PDF documents, sometimes called "Web Optimized" or "Fast Web View" enabled. This feature has been a part of the PDF specification since Acrobat 3.0, but it's poorly understood even by developers.

BFO have released a major update to their PDF Library. The 2.10.3 release has a number of significant improvements across the board: for the first time the PDF library can now write Linearized, or "web-optimized" PDF's, which are optimized for faster display in a web browser. Text extraction has been rewritten and is now significantly faster and more accurate. A bug causing higher than necessary ...

Hello and welcome to the latest section of BFO's website, the "BFO Blog". We'll be using this section to disseminate useful bits of information that we think our customers might want to hear, but that don't really fit anywhere else.

Data mining software company harness BFOs PDF Library functionality to generate PDFs and extract text from documents.

Columbia University acquires Big Faceless Report Generator for integration in their web portal student application process.

The Big Faceless library is being used by the British Columbia Ministry of the Attorney General to help process electronically filed court documents.