Apache PDFBox is an open source pure-Java library that can be used to create, render, print, split, merge, alter, verify and extract text and meta-data of PDF files.
Open Hub reports over 11,000 commits (since the start as an Apache project) by 18 contributors representing more than 140,000 lines of code. PDFBox has a well established, mature codebase maintained by an average size development team with increasing year-over-year commits. Using the COCOMO model, it took an estimated 46 person-years of effort.[2]
Preflight (optional): checks PDF files for PDF/A-1b conformity.
History
PDFBox was started in 2002 in SourceForge by Ben Litchfield who wanted to be able to extract text of PDF files for Lucene.[3] It became an Apache Incubator project in 2008, and an Apache top level project in 2009.[4]
Preflight was originally named PaDaF and developed by Atos worldline, and donated to the project in 2011.[5]
In February 2015, Apache PDFBox was named an Open Source Partner Organization of the PDF Association.[6]