Java News from Thursday, November 24, 2005

Mark Stephens has released JPedal 2.61, a pure Java library for extracting content from PDF files and rasterizing them. Text fragments are extracted as XML elements with font and location information. Images are extracted in both their raw formats and their clipped and scaled formats as TIFF, PNG, or JPEG files. According to Stephens, "Version 2.61 offers much faster scrolling and decoding, better PDF support especially for shading and annotations, better handling for FDF forms and a large number of bug fixes." JPedal is published under the GPL.


Bare Bones Software has released version 8.2.4 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac. This is a bug fix release. BBEdit is $179 payware. Upgrades from 8.x are free. They're $49 for 7.0 owners and $59 for owners of earlier versions. Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later is required.