ICEsoft has released ICEpdf, their pure-Java PDF library and rendering engine under the MPL open source license. ICEpdf is a lightweight open source Java PDF rendering library that can be easily integrated within any Java server-side application (headless mode) as a PDF servlet (JSP or JSF). ICEpdf provides PDF rendering and content conversion and extraction capabilities to any Java application, without the hassles of Java-to-native integration issues. In support of the release of ICEpdf, ICEsoft is also launching a new community website, www.icepdf.org. The site provides forum support for community users, demos, as well as user documentation and other product related information. ICEpdf is available for immediate download: www.icepdf.org/downloads.html. See ICEpdf in action: http://www.icepdf.org/demos.html. Read the press release.

I've worked on lots of projects in lots of companies and all were using iText or Apache FOP to produce PDFs. It's nice to have another open source option, but I've never ever heard of ICEpdf and so I wonder how it can the "leading Java PDF Rendering Library" as claimed here. Has anyone else used it? Even heard of it? What were your experiences with it?

I never used IcePDF (never had the need of such a library) but looking at the demos I guess it serves a completely different purpose as iText and Fop. IText and Fop are used to create Pdf whereas IcePdf is used to display existing Pdf on the user screen; for what I have seen in the demos they are rendered as PNG images. I never heard any other java library which does such a thing, so I guess this may be the leading one. I agree with the fact that a new open source product is always welcome, even if I don't and never did need it right now :-)

pdf-renderer was previously open source too (LGPL license). What are the differences between icepdf and pdf-renderer ? Thanks. Dominique http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito

ICEpdf has been a closed source commercial library for the past 5 years and has been used in everything from aerospace to embedded devices. It has been tested against tens of thousands of PDF documents in the wild and as a result it is pretty battle hardened. There is not much that the library can’t open and view. Pdf-renderer is an interested library. I think the main differences that you will see when compared to ICEpdf is the maturity of the parsing core. Pdf-rendered seems to have a hard time with malformed PDF documents and certain parts of the PDF specification. I think the MPL licensing of ICEpdf is a value add too. ICEpdf differs from FOP and IText in that it is not currently in the PDF creation business. The libraries primary use is to render PDF documents as accurately as possible: screen, print, image etc. PDF image and text extraction is also possible.

After playing with it for a few minutes, there were a few things that impressed me: 1. The quality of rendering is amazingly high! 2. The rendering speed is enormously slow.

I didn't think it was so slow. Certainly well within the usable range. Were you looking at the WebStart Swing Viewer?

I have a question. When I use icepdf-viewer to open a pdf, I find the bookmark has some display problem. Has someone find this? And can NOT search the chinese word . the render is good with english. but for the cjk it is not good enough.

Hi, I had a similar issue with icepdf. Using the commercial (trial version) solved my issue but that version is not free :-( So probably you can give it a try. Georges

Tried the viewer on a pdf at http://www.idealware.org/comparing_os_cms/idealware_comparing_os_cms_report.pdf and didn't have to browse longer than page 3 and 4 for severe rendering bugs. Cheers, Emil

We're using jPod Renderer with great success. We needed a open source library to render PDFs to PNGs. We compared jPod to PDF-renderer and JPedal and jPod came out on top. jPod is the fastest and most accurate of the three, at least for the PDFs we used. The only problems I can see with it is that it uses native code to do the font rendering (FreeType) and that is GPL licensed. The native code is 32-bit only but should work on both Windows, Linux and MacOSX (we're using Linux). I'll take a look at ICEpdf but I doubt that it will be any better than jPod except for the more liberal licensing. The font engine is NOT included in the open source version so I cannot imagine that the font rendering can compare to that of jPod. However, it seems like the font engine is pluggable so maybe someone will develop an alternative open source engine which uses FreeType or similar. Other open source PDF libraries can be found at http://java-source.net/open-source/pdf-libraries. Niklas Therning Trillian AB

Thanks for this good evaluation of jpodRenderer. Just a remark to the font rendering - rendering is done in plain java. Freetype is used to get the best portable font parsing available so far. The contours returned by freetype are then rendered in Java. Btw. the font engines are pluggable with jPodRenderer, too, so you can switch to complete Java code if needed. The 32 bit restriction is fixed with the next release (and there is a update beta package on sourceforge). To get an impression of jPodRenderer at work, see www.cabaret-solutions.com.