Product Overview

The PDF Library reads and writes PDFs for all versions of Acrobat (including PDF 2.0), and boasts a dynamic range of features including:

• Transparent Unicode support - create documents in Arabic, Russian or Japanese as easily as English
• TrueType and Type1 fonts, with subsetting for smaller files. Great for OCR
• PDF Encryption, for password-protected documents (40 and 128 bit RC4 or AES)
• Embed JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF or java.awt.Image images, or add Barcodes directly to the PDF
• Use Spot colors, calibrated ICC profiles and other advanced colorspaces
• Add HTML-style Hyperlinks to text or images
• Process 1000+ words a second with kerning, ligatures, justification and ‘curly quotes’ for legibility
• Simplify complex document creation by defining and applying "Styles"
• Full support for PDF features like bookmarks, compression and document meta-information
• Non-linear creation of documents - pages can be created and edited in any order
• Supports PDF/UA standard

Extended Edition

The Extended Edition of the Java PDF Library offers additional features:

• Load and edit existing PDF documents, as templates or merge with others
• Create and edit interactive Forms, or "AcroForm"
• Digitally sign documents, or verify existing digital signatures
• Can read and write Linearized or "web ready" PDFs, designed for faster downloading

Java PDF Viewer

On top of the Extended edition, the Viewer Extension can be used to display PDFs:

• Swing component for displaying PDF documents
• Convert PDF to Tiff (or any other bitmap format)
• Extract and index text and images from PDF documents, including integration with Apache Lucene
• Print PDF documents, including support for annotations and other PDF features not supported by Java 5 printing
• Create PDF/A documents: Pre-flight new or existing PDFs against various PDF/A and PDF/X profiles

Product Benefits

BFOs PDF Library provides unparalleled implementation flexibility and reliability for the developer. It's scalable, thread-safe and extremely fast, having been honed over the years and runs on any Java platform from the humble PC up to Mainframes.

The API has been designed so you don't need to know the PDF specification in order to create PDFs. We hide as much of the gory details as possible but still give you almost complete control over the PDF itself. Where possible we re-use standard Java classes - for example the pages are stored in a java.util.List, which can be manipulated any way you like (so moving pages from one document to another is a breeze). This means an API which is smaller and easier to remember.

The Viewer Extension allows PDFs to be parsed and converted to bitmaps for display, to be saved as a bitmap image (e.g TIFF) or for printing. Although Java 5 theoretically supports printing PDFs out of the box, results are often poor and support for features like annotations, encrypted documents etc. is incomplete. Our PDF library fills this gap, giving consistent results for all PDFs.

Customers Using the PDF Library say:

• "The detailed Library, the framework design of the PDF Viewer and the competent support team puts you on the right track. It is worth the license costs for sure" - cyberDOC GmbH & Co KG
• "The tool is flexible, scalable and cost effective" - SEC Ventures, LLC
• "Boy I love working with you guys. You nailed it. I wish some of my other software vendors could diagnose as quickly" - toro.com
• "My questions were answered very quickly and the answers resolved my problems. I've been very pleased with the BFO support" - Toyota

Free Trial

Download Free Trial

The trial version is fully functional (it adds a "DEMO" stamp to each page it creates), which allows you as much time as you need to ensure that it meets your requirements. We offer free ad-hoc support during development so if you have any technical queries please do drop us an email.

You will need Java 1.4 or later installed and running on your system. The PDF library uses no native code, requires no other packages to be installed and will run easily from EJB's, Servlets or JSP's on Windows, Unix or any other system running Java 1.4 or later (although we strongly recommend Java 5 or later if possible, and this is a requirement for the Swing Viewer classes).