IDRsolutions have released version 2.8 of their JPedal PDF library. The Standard version is available under a dual commercial/GPL license while the Enhanced version is a commercial only version. The Standard version comes with full source code and offers a comprehensive viewer, PDF manipulation features (delete,rotate, N-up functions), itext integration, extraction, and dynamic FDF forms and Annotations support. The Enhanced version adds additional functionality including shading, multi-page layouts, Acrobat style print dialog, and much faster scrolling. It starts at $479 USD (roughly 376 Euro) for single licenses. Full details at http://www.jpedal.org

Is there any comparison between JPedal (both community & commercial versions) and iText? I'd like to know what I can't do with iText but JPedal commercial version.

This was in their FAQ: Q. What about creating pdfs in Java? There is already a package called iText which does this very well. JPedal is designed to fill the gap in extracting data

Is there any comparison between JPedal (both community & commercial versions) and iText? I'd like to know what I can't do with iText but JPedal commercial version.

iText is used for generating PDFs... JPedal's strength is in extracting from PDFs and viewing PDFs (is this a Swing only viewer?). If you take some time and look around, you will find a surprising lack of open source PDF viewers for Java (Swing). For those of us building rich client applications in Swing, this is rather frustrating. Yes, JPedal has an open source version, but it is GPL only, forcing you to pay if you are deploying it in an enterprise or commercial application. There are some other open source odds and ends available for PDF viewing in Java (without resorting to JNI, etc), but you are going to have to assemble these pieces together, and it isn't straightforward. This is all even more surprising considering what a good fit Java2D seems to be for the PDF format. Why aren't there any pure Java (Java2D) open source viewers for PDF (besides the restrictive GPL ones)?

There is Adobe's discontinued Bean.... Most PDF viewer tools are under commercial or dual licenses because of the amount of work required needs lots of full-time development with some income stream to fund it... In some ways Java2D is close to PDF and in other ways very far away - the co-ordinate systems are mirror images, so you need to drawn things upside down and flip and Suns font support is not up to supporting PDF embedded fonts, so you need a font renderer for 5 different font types. And you need to decode the colorspaces into sRGB, parse the objects...Drawing in Graphics2D is just the last phase.

JPedal gives you a GUI front end for accessing itext functions. If you have itext on the classpath, JPedal will use it to offer tools to delete, rotate pages, N-up functions, pamphlets and other manipulation tools.

Can Jpedal open password protected pdf and then save it without a password ? I'm using for this task PDFLib. And it has awfull classloader problems. It is using native windows dll. So everytime I reload app in Tomcat, PDFLib breaks. So instead of reloading App I have to restart Tomcat.