In iText in Action: Creating and Manipulating PDF, author Bruno Lowagie walks through everything PDF, Adobe's Portable Document Format, from a Java developer's point of view. Lowagie covers how to use iText in a Java/J2EE application for the production and/or manipulation of PDF documents. Along the way, Lowagie describes interesting PDF features and explains more obscure e-document functionalities. In addition to many small code samples, this book includes XML-based, ready-made solutions that can easily be adapted and integrated into projects. In chapter 3 of this book, titled "PDF: why and when," Lowagie takes a close look at the PDF. The first section of this chapter explains why PDF was invented and how it evolved into a de facto standard. In the second section, Lowagie describes the different PDF "flavors," some of which are described in an International Standards Organization (ISO) standard. Lowagie uses a table listing different versions of the PDF specification to focus on specific features such as compression and encryption. He also uses "Hello World" examples to show how to compress/decompress and encrypt/decrypt PDF files. What are some of the more obscure functionalities you've come across when working with a PDF?

Sounds like an interesting book. I was wondering if the book covers topics on how to 1) extract embedded metadata (such as IPTC) 2) extract XMP metadata from the PDF and write XMP back to PDF 3) extract pages of the PDF and make make new set of PDF using these pages. I am not sure iText tool does all these, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Thanks Chester

iText is a great toolkit. I've used it a couple of times, and it's quite powerful - will definitely take a look at the book when I get a chance.