Editing IText (section)

==History==
iText (formerly known as ''rugPDF'') was developed in the winter of 1998 as an in-house project at [[Ghent University]] to create [[PDF]] document applications for student administration. Preliminary versions could only initially read and write PDF files, and they required developers to be knowledgeable of [[PDF]] syntax, objects, operators, and operands to work with the library. Leonard Rosenthol, PDF Architect at [[Adobe Systems|Adobe]], lists iText as one of the early milestones in the history of the openness of PDF.<ref>{{cite web |date=November 2007 |title=pdf |url=http://pdf-pdf.blogspot.be/2007/11/pdf-adobe-acrobat-history.html |work=pdf-pdf.blogspot.be}}</ref>

In 1999, Lowagie disbanded the rugPDF code and wrote a new library named iText. Lowagie created iText as a library that Java developers could use to create PDF documents without knowing PDF syntax and released it as a [[Free and Open Source Software]] (FOSS) product on February 14, 2000. In the summer of 2000, Paulo Soares joined the project and is now considered one of the main developers.

In late 2008, iText became available for proprietary license, and in early 2009, iText Software Corp. was formed to be the worldwide licensor of iText products.<ref>{{cite web |title=Feature article in Wereldwijs, a monthly magazine by Flanders Investment and Trade (in Dutch) |url=http://epub01.publitas.com/173/34/ |access-date=2013-10-26 |publisher=Epub01.publitas.com}}</ref>

iText has since been ported to the [[.NET Framework]] under the name iTextSharp, written in [[C Sharp (programming language)|C#]]. While it has a separate code base, it is synchronised to the main iText release schedule.