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This guide describes the updates in Apache PDFBox 3.0 release. Use the information provided to upgrade your PDFBox 2.x applications to PDFBox 3.0. It provides information about the new, deprecated and unsupported features in this release.
PDFBox 3.0 requires at least Java 8. Testing has been done up to Java 19.
Apache Xmpbox no longer depends on javax.xml.bind.jaxb-api. All test classes were updated to use JUnit 5.
All libraries on which PDFBox depends are updated to their latest stable versions:
For test support the libraries are updated to
This section explains the fundamental differences between PDFBox 3.0 and 2.x releases.
All deprecated APIs and components from PDFBox 2.x have been removed in PDFBox 3.0. Deprecated APIs in
PDPageContentStream have been kept but you are encouraged to replace them with the non deprecated calls
as they are treated to be of internal use only.
All basic classes used for io-operations where moved to a separate module for a shared usage.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
<artifactId>io</artifactId>
</dependency>
The whole code was overhauled including the following changes:
The new class org.apache.pdfbox.Loader is used for loading a PDF. It offers several methods to load a pdf using different kind of sources. All load methods have been removed from org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument. The same is true for loading a FDF document.
Sample usage:
try (PDDocument document = Loader.loadPDF(new File("yourfile.pdf")))
{
for (PDPage page : document.getPages())
{
....
}
}
When saving a PDF this will now be done in compressed mode by default. To override that use PDDocument.save with CompressParameters.NO_COMPRESSION.
The input file must not be used as output for saving operations. It will corrupt the file and throw an exception as parts of the file are read the first time when saving it.
PDFBox now loads a PDF Document incrementally reducing the initial memory footprint. This will also reduce the memory needed to consume a PDF if only certain parts of the PDF are accessed. Note that, due to the nature of PDF, uses such as iterating over all pages, accessing annotations, signing a PDF etc. might still load all parts of the PDF overtime leading to a similar memory consumption as with PDFBox 2.0.
The introduction of the new io classes has a positive impact on the memory usage. Especially the re-usage of the source for reading parts of it instead of using intermediate streams reduces the memory footprint significantly.
There were a lot of changes and optimizations which have a more or less huge impact on the memory consumption.
The static instances of PDType1Font for the standard 14 fonts were removed as the underlying COSDictionary isn't supposed to be immutable which led to several issues.
A new constructor for PDType1Font was introduced to create a standard 14 font. The new Enum Standard14Fonts.FontName is the one and only parameter and defines the
name of the standard 14 font for which the instance of PDType1Font is created for. That instance isn't a singleton anymore and has to be recreated if necessary or cached
by the user if suitable.
When accessing AcroForms using PDDocumentCatalog.getAcroForm() a number of fix ups are applied aligning PDFBox with most of the default behaviour
of Adobe Reader. If you'd like to bypass this use PDDocumentCatalog.getAcroForm(null).
The fix ups include
You can lookup the details in the org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.fixup package of the source distribution and also create your own fix up(s).
The command line interface for the PDFBox App has been rewritten. As a result
-h or --help to display usage information-V or --version to display the version information