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.

A book about IT has done very well if more than 5,000 copies were sold. The first edition of "iText in Action" was a best seller. These are the numbers for the second edition:

period	Domestic	International	Special/Direct	eBook
10Q4	987 - 1	386 - 1	546	1445
11Q1	260 - 7	6 - 0	54	211
11Q2	313 - 81	3 - 1	33	161
11Q3	369 - 30	107 - 2	48	108
11Q4	315 - 12	30 - 2	41	108
12Q1	276 - 18	1 - 1	185	122
12Q2	257 - 30	44 - 0	43	136
12Q3	222 - 29	5 - 0	26	108
12Q4	129 - 20	65 - 0	44	119
	2900	640	1020	2518

In other words, up until now 7078 copies of the book have been sold: 4560 paper books and 2518 eBooks.

Read more about the book or buy the book!

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?