iTextSharp 5.5.4

We're releasing iText 5.5.4 on December 17, exactly 3 months after the previous release. If you scroll down in the changelog, you notice that once again, XFA Worker has received plenty of attention. Our initial XFA customers are very happy with the functionality we provided in previous versions, but new XFA customers are discovering more and more features in the XFA spec and we're consistently adding these features to XFA worker.

But let's focus on the open source part of iText:

The most promising new feature is hidden in a single line: Added PDF "clean up" functionality that can be used for redaction. We don't have any examples yet, but it seems that more and more people are asking for functionality that allows you to remove content from a PDF. With "to remove", we don't mean "covering it with a colored rectangle", but to actually remove content from the PDF's content stream. Currently, we allow removing content based on redaction annotations as well as based on rectangles you can define in your code. This functionality is currently only available in the Java version, it hasn't been ported to C# yet (it's on our TODO list). Once we have some examples, we count on your feedback to improve this functionality.

Our efforts with respect to PDF/A support seem to be appreciated. We've received interesting feedback and... some bug reports. We fixed problems with images in PDF/A-1A, problems with combinations of PDF/A-2 and signatures, we've added ZUGFeRD extension levels, and so on... On a related note: we've added some fixes that help people to avoid a common pitfall when manipulating a Tagged PDF document. When creating PDF from HTML, we now take the alt value of an tag into account.

Some languages have a "right to left" writing system that can be set with the dir attribute in HTML. We've now added support for this attribute in XML Worker, and while we were at it, we've added support for justified text when writing from right to left.

We've discovered that some people were using the LargeElement functionality for PdfPTables in a way that made them lose a row and/or a header. We applied a fix so that this wouldn't happen anymore in the future.

These are the most important enhancements and fixes, you can take a look at the changelog for more info.

We've improved PdfGraphics2D when using font families for which there are no fonts available for every style (for instance: no bold font, no italic font, or not bold-italic font).