iText Suite 9.2: .NET MAUI AOT, PDF/UA-2 Validation, and More!

Continuing 25 years of iText in the open-source space, Apryse has released iText Suite 9.2. This introduces support for .NET MAUI AOT compilation and automated PDF/UA-2 validation during the document creation process. Alongside that, there's more convenient creation of accessible PDF/UA documents and conversion from HTML, plus various enhancements in PDF optimization and control of advanced typography features.

.NET MAUI AOT Compilation

The iText Core PDF library now supports Native Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation for .NET MAUI, offering benefits like smaller file sizes, faster startup, and reduced memory usage, especially useful for iOS and macOS development.

This means our .NET developers can reap similar rewards to iText's Java community who benefitted from  the GraalVM Native Image support added last year. AOT compilation is especially useful when building for iOS since traditional Just in Time (JIT) compilation is heavily restricted for the App Store. Using MAUI’s AOT runtime could be a game changer in such cases.

Automated PDF/UA-2 Validation

The release extends iText's automated checks for accessible PDF documents to the latest PDF/UA-2 standard. The new PdfConformance abstraction supports all flavors of PDF/A and PDF/UA, for enhanced and extensible validation.

Ensuring PDF documents are accessible to all users is increasingly necessary, particularly with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) joining other accessibility regulations already in effect such as Section 508 and the Accessible Canada Act. Thanks to iText's superb capabilities for the creation of universally accessible PDFs, you can easily meet the compliance requirements of such regulations—or even exceed them.

Advanced Typography Controls for pdfCalligraph

iText Core's pdfCalligraph add-on now offers finer control over OpenType features, allowing users to apply advanced typography features like swashes and other advanced kerning adjustments selectively within documents, enhancing text rendering accuracy.

Improved PDF/UA Creation from HTML

iText Core offers excellent functionality for creating universally accessible PDFs from scratch. However, converting from HTML is a great option as you can reuse HTML's semantic and structural information.

The updated pdfHTML add-on in this release makes HTML to PDF/UA conversion even simpler with a high-level switch for seamless creation of PDF/UA-1 and PDF/UA-2 conformant documents. Not only that, there are further improvements to CSS Flexbox support and conversion of SVG tags to PDF/UA.

Enhanced Optimization

A new release of pdfOptimizer improves detection of duplicated XObjects, significantly reducing file sizes where images are reused in documents. We've also resolved some issues with font subsetting, ensuring data integrity in optimized documents.

Miscellaneous Improvements and Fixes

Related to the new PDF/UA-2 checks and improved API for HTML to PDF/UA, we have some improvements and fixes for PDF 2.0 conformance. A special checker is introduced for tag structure, based on the parent-child tag relationships defined in the PDF 2.0 specification. In addition. some issues in PDF 2.0 tag conversion and structure repair operations were resolved.

For more information on iText Suite 9.2, see the release announcement or check the release notes on the iText Knowledge Base. Here you can find full details and download links, along with documentation and examples for the new features.