Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

I've updated the iText whiteboard with the plans for further development:

Our development team is currently working on XML Worker, but we have plans for better support for Digital Signatures in August.
My work in the next few days, is to write slides for the iText course I'm teaching next Friday. It will be the first time I teach an iText class since the second edition of "iText in Action" was published. I really need new slides...

Last saturday, we formed an iText team for #appsforghent. Our goal was to learn more about open data. We didn't have the time to finish an application. Nevertheless, we received good comments from the jury:

It's a fact: ebooks are getting more popular than printed books. It was in the news yesterday, and my publisher, Manning Publications, immediately responded to this news in his Weekly Special:

Why we still love paper
Nothing beats the tactile pleasure of a printed book. At Manning we call them pBooks, and we like to think they will be with you for years of use, making a satisfying thud when you place them on your desk. Better still, when you buy a Manning pBook, you also get the PDF eBook instantly at no additional cost—as well as the epub and mobi mobile formats when they're available.

... grow on trees, don't they?

The first couple of strawberries that were ripe were eaten by birds, hence the improvised net to protect them.

Last Saturday, team iText was one of the teams a the first #appsforghent event. The goal of this event was for the government to open up data (in this case, data about the city of Ghent and data from the Flemish bus transportation provider De Lijn). Our goal was to learn more about the data, especially the data about public transport, and, if possible, use this data to create cool maps.

This is what we did last Saturday (presentation in Dutch):

Today, North Bridge announced its findings from the 2011 "Future of Open Source" survey. This is the presentation of the keynote:
Future of Open Source 2011 Survey, Open Source Business Conference

Do you remember the trademark scams I reported three months ago? On that same day, February 17, I filed a complaint on the Belgian ecops-site. Up until today, I didn't receive any answer. I almost missed the answer, because this is the mail that I received:

As you can see, the mail didn't have any content! It just had one attachment: a Word document.

Ten days ago, itextpdf.com was ranked #102,746 based on the visits of one week.
In the week after the 5.0.1, the 7 day ranking gained 33,292 places:

The effect on the overal ranking (based on a period of three months) isn't that big.
We moved from place #80,491 to place #79,499. Which is nice ;-)

On May first, I made this screen shot:

Today, the screen shot looks like this:

THIS POST IS KEPT FOR HISTORICAL REASONS, BUT IT'S NO LONGER RELEVANT.
THE ISSUE HAS BEEN SOLVED (SEE ENFORCING YOUR TRADEMARK).

iText is a registered trademark by 1T3XT BVBA. This means we are now allowed to put an ® behind the word iText, and competitors can no longer buy the word iText from Google AdWords to lure customers to their sites (which was the main reason why I filed the trademark).