Apache PDFBox
| Company type | Open source software project |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software development |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Founder | Ben Litchfield |
| Headquarters | United States |
| Products | PDF creation, rendering, printing, splitting, merging, modification, validation, and text/metadata extraction tools |
| Owner | Apache Software Foundation |
| Website | pdfbox |
Apache PDFBox is a fully open source Java library designed for the creation, rendering, printing, splitting, merging, modification, validation, and extraction of text and metadata within PDF documents.
According to Open Hub, since its adoption as an Apache initiative, the project has accumulated over 11,000 commits from 18 contributors, spanning more than 140,000 lines of code. PDFBox boasts a well-established codebase that benefits from a dedicated development team with steadily increasing annual contributions. Applying the COCOMO estimation model indicates that the project encompasses approximately 46 person-years of development effort.
Structure
The Apache PDFBox suite is composed of the following components:
- PDFBox: provides the primary features
- FontBox: manages font-related data
- XmpBox: processes XMP metadata
- Preflight (optional): performs validation of PDFs for PDF/A-1b standard compliance
History
Initiated in 2002 on SourceForge by Ben Litchfield to facilitate text extraction for Lucene, PDFBox joined the Apache Incubator in 2008 and was elevated to a top-level project within Apache in 2009.
The Preflight module originated as PaDaF, created by Atos worldline, and was integrated into PDFBox in 2011.
In February 2015, Apache PDFBox earned recognition as an Open Source Partner Organization by the PDF Association.