i7j-rups VS Apache PDFBox

Great post. I've spend a lot of time reading through the PDF specification over the last ~5 years while building DocSpring [1], and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. qpdf is a great tool. One of my other favorites is RUPS [2], which really lets you dig into the structure of a PDF.

[1] https://docspring.com

[2] https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups

> find a version of iText RUPS application from somewhere on the internet

You mean this, right? https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups#readme

It's not an online tool, but it's free nonetheless: https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups

Are you looking for a way to render PDF's or produce them? If you want to produce PDF's, I've used https://pdfbox.apache.org/ successfully as well as https://itextpdf.com/ (potentially costs money).

If you don't mind using java, you can use the open source Apache PDFBox library

https://pdfbox.apache.org/

It's relatively performant and it's a mature and supported codebase that can accomplish most pdf tasks.

Then, open the pdf_utils/pom.xml file and add a dependency to PDFBox, in the dependencies section:

There are some libraries for Java that can help you create a PDF file such as PDFBox or IText. Here there's a short exaplanation on how to use them.

So, when I started to view the documents, a lot of them simply failed to open. I had to look around for a library that could verify PDF documents. I had some experience with PDFBox in the past, so it seemed to be a good go-to solution. It had no way to verify documents by default, but it could open and parse them and that was enough to filter out the incorrect ones. It felt a little bit strange just to read the whole PDF into the memory to verify if it is correct or not, but hey I needed a simple fix for now and it worked really well.

PDFBox can do this. It’s not part of the CLI but it wouldn’t be too hard to add:

https://github.com/apache/pdfbox/blob/5b00807463279f1002e245...