Apache PDFBox

The Apache PDFBox library is an open source Java tool for working with PDF
documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation
of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents.
PDFBox also includes several command line utilities. PDFBox is published
under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

PDFBox is a project of the Apache Software Foundation.

Binary Downloads

You can download binary versions for releases currently under development or older
releases from our Download Page.

Build

You need Java 11 (or higher) and Maven 3 to
build PDFBox. The recommended build command is:

mvn clean install

The default build will compile the Java sources and package the binary
classes into jar packages. See the Maven documentation for all the
other available build options.

Contribute

There are various ways to help us improve PDFBox.

• look at the Issue Tracker to help us fix bugs.
• answer questions on our Users Mailing List.
• help us enhance the Examples
• help us to enhance the PDFBox Documentation
  or on GitHub.

Support

Please follow the guidelines at our Support Page.

If you have questions about how to use PDFBox do ask on the
Users Mailing List.
This will get you help from the entire community.

The PDFBox examples and the test code in the sources will also provide additional information.

And there are additional resources available on sites such as
Stack Overflow.

If you are sure you have found a bug the please report the issue in our
Issue Tracker.

Known Limitations and Problems

See the Issue Tracker for
the full list of known issues and requested features. Some of the more
common issues are:

1. You get text like “G38G43G36G51G5” instead of what you expect when you are
   extracting text. This is because the characters are a meaningless internal
   encoding that point to glyphs that are embedded in the PDF document. The
   only way to access the text is to use OCR. This may be a future
   enhancement.

2. You get an error message like java.io.IOException: Can't handle font width
   this MIGHT be due to the fact that you don’t have the
   org/apache/pdfbox/resources directory in your classpath. The easiest
   solution is to include the apache-pdfbox-x.x.x.jar in your classpath.

3. You get text that has the correct characters, but in the wrong
   order. This mght be because you have not enabled sorting. The text
   in PDF files is stored in chunks and the chunks do not need to be stored
   in the order that they are displayed on a page. By default, PDFBox does
   not sort the text.

License (see also LICENSE.txt)

Collective work: Copyright 2015 The Apache Software Foundation.

Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
(the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with
the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

 https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Export control

This distribution includes cryptographic software. The country in which
you currently reside may have restrictions on the import, possession, use,
and/or re-export to another country, of encryption software. BEFORE using
any encryption software, please check your country’s laws, regulations and
policies concerning the import, possession, or use, and re-export of
encryption software, to see if this is permitted. See
https://www.wassenaar.org/ for more information.

The U.S. Government Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and
Security (BIS), has classified this software as Export Commodity Control
Number (ECCN) 5D002.C.1, which includes information security software using
or performing cryptographic functions with asymmetric algorithms. The form
and manner of this Apache Software Foundation distribution makes it eligible
for export under the License Exception ENC Technology Software Unrestricted
(TSU) exception (see the BIS Export Administration Regulations, Section
740.13) for both object code and source code.

The following provides more details on the included cryptographic software:

Apache PDFBox uses the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) and the
Bouncy Castle libraries for handling encryption in PDF documents.