Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Dear Powers That Be at Google,

it was brought to my attention that the Google Analytics team considers PDF reporting to be <quote>a very hard feature to maintain and the GA team is considering leaving it out</quote>.

Imagine my surprise when I read this!

About a month and a half ago, my wife and I went to Paris to do a book promo. I also did an interview with Celinio Fernandes. This interview (in French) is now online: Interview de Bruno Lowagie - Créateur de la librairie iText® (Paris - 10 mars 2011) .

There once was a time when I thought: "no money = no worries". That's why we used to refuse requests from companies who wanted to pay for iText five to ten years ago. Then suddenly we were proven wrong. The "no money = no worries" equation didn't compute. It took some time for me to realize that; several people had to convince me that a change was needed. Now that we've made the change, and now that we're generating revenue, I finally can afford doing things I've always wanted to do. For instance: hire developers to write code I can't write on my own. But that's not my only goal.

Last week, we had somebody come over for the electricity and for the floor:


This weeks will be a slow week. Normally, they'll continue working on the electricity (new fusebox, network plugs, etc...), but we have to wait 6 weeks for the lighting and we didn't contact somebody to paint the walls yet (they aren't dry enough to start painting anyway). We also didn't decide on the new office furniture yet.

We finally have news about Inigo's surgery.

Last Friday, I wrote a post about The impact of Twitter, LinkedIn, FB on two blog posts. I promised to keep you posted, so here are some now graphs:

Two weeks are gone since the last top 5. What's new in this week's top 5?

1. Why doesn't my mail appear on the mailing list?

A question that is often sent to a private e-mail address, e.g. a users.sourceforge.net mail address.
The standard answer: please read The Rules.

2. Does iText have ligature implementation for Indian languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, etc?

Exactly three months ago, I started an experiment: I added small widget to a number of pages on the itextpdf.com domains with the goal to reach position #85,000 in the Alexa ranking (I think that's where the iText^® site belongs). I succeeded:

Nice promotional video for Flanders:

One question though: if there are flexible customs arrangements, why do I have to pay 10 euro to receive a signed contract from a US company?

I wasn't able to work in the iText Office for three weeks now. This is what the office looked like 10 days ago:

Today, the room looks like this:


Next week: electricity (wires, outlets, fusebox,...) and a new floor.