BFO have released a major update to their PDF Library. The 2.10.3 release has a number of significant improvements across the board: for the first time the PDF library can now write Linearized, or "web-optimized" PDF's, which are optimized for faster display in a web browser. Text extraction has been rewritten and is now significantly faster and more accurate. A bug causing higher than necessary memory use with the PDFReader has been squashed, and there are a number of speed and stability improvements. The Swing PDF Viewer has some very significant stability improvements, and now includes the ability to search and select text from a PDF.

The new release is recommended for all our customers, and is available for download now at http://bfo.co.uk. See the PDF Library Changelog for more details.

Hello and welcome to the latest section of BFO's website, the "BFO Blog". We'll be using this section to disseminate useful bits of information that we think our customers might want to hear, but that don't really fit anywhere else.

The PDF specification runs to 1300 pages, and with the recent release of Acrobat 9.0 that's about to increase still further. Over the coming months we'll try to sift some gems from this rubble, as well as offering optimization tips, tricks, hacks and ideas on squeezing the most out of both our products and Java. Stay tuned.