Acknowledgments

I thought that writing this second edition would be easier than writing the first. I was wrong. Yes, the process of writing itself was easier because I had the experience, but I didn’t take into account how little free time I have now, compared to three years ago. On top of that, different incidents have cost me handfuls of time, such as my now ex-hosting provider which caused me to lose all the data on my dedicated server.

I don’t know what I would have done without the support of my wife, Ingeborg Willaert, and my children, Inigo and Jago, during those moments of despair. They always remind me of what is really important in life, and that helps when faced with problems big and small. I want to thank them for that.

iText wouldn’t be iText if it weren’t for the developers. In the first place, I would like to thank Paulo Soares, who started working on iText in the summer of 2000 and who has been contributing code ever since. Kudos to Xavier Le Vourch for the continuous integration server he has set up for iText, and for the many code clean-up operations. Two other developers complete the list of project members on the SourceForge pages of the iText project: Mark Storer, who was the technical editor of the first edition, and Kevin Day, who designed the functionality to extract text from PDF files. Numerous people contributed valuable code, fixed bugs, added new features, and posted useful answers on the mailing list. The list of names is too long to sum up. Thank you all for making iText the library it is today!

I want to thank Adobe’s PDF technical standards evangelist Leonard Rosenthol, for sharing his insights on the PDF format; Adobe’s VP of engineering Bob Wulff; and last but not least, Adobe’s principal scientist Jim King, who reviewed and corrected sections 13.1 and 13.2.

Special thanks go to Andrew Binstock, Kevin Brown, and Michael Bradbury. There wouldn’t be any iText business without their help. I’m also grateful to Christophe Vangeel, Evi Mellebeek, Frank Gielen, Peter Camps, Peter Myngheer, and Wouter De Stecker for helping me understand the different aspects of doing business, and I want to thank Stephan Janssen for organizing Devoxx.

A Flemish “hartelijk bedankt” goes to all of my current and former colleagues at Ghent University, especially to my fellow whiteboard artists, Johan Lauryssens, Cédric Peirsegaele, and Peter Van de Voorde; to my former bosses, professor Geert De Soete and Bernard Becue; to my current bosses, Danny Schellemans and Luc Verschraegen; and to the rector and vice-rector of the University, professor Paul Van Cauwenberghe and professor Luc Moens.

I want to take advantage of these acknowledgment pages to thank my employer for the flexibility I was offered while my son was treated for cancer.

During the year my son was in the hospital, many people gave me the courage to keep strong: William Alexander Segraves, Juancho Diaz, Ingrid Adriaens, Heidi Naeye, Marleen Depaemelaere, Ines Bruyninckx, Liesje Berteloot, Tania Bruggeman, Cathy De Kerf, Mieke Simoen, Wendy Jacobs, and many others.

The theme of this book was inspired by the friends of the film festival in Ghent, and I want to thank Wim De Witte for the excellent selection of movies presented each year, and Daniella De Decker, for helping us enjoy as many movies as possible during the festival.

I would like to thank all the people at Manning Publications for giving me the opportunity to write this book, including publisher Marjan Bace, Michael Stephens, Katharine Osborne, Andy Carroll, Elizabeth Martin, Gordan Salinovic, and Mary Piergies, as well as everyone else on the team who worked on my book.

Sincere thanks to the people who reviewed my manuscript. Their remarks and suggestions at different stages of development were invaluable to me in making this a better book: Andrew Binstock, Mark Stephens, Marc Gravell, Leonardo Padula, Jim King, Kevin Day, John S. Griffin, William A. Segraves, Alexis Pigeon, Paulo Soares, Thomas Morgner, Michael Klink, Matt Michalak, Michael Niedermair, and Saicharan Manga for completing a technical proofread of the manuscript shortly before it went to press.

Finally, I want to thank you, the people who are using iText. You are the ones who have kept me going! Many of you have sent me nice notes of appreciation. Thanks! I couldn’t have written this book without your encouragement.