Welcome on the iText toolbox page. This page provides a little bit of information about iText, and a lot of information about the simple GUI that was built for iText: the iText toolbox.

iText is a free / open source Java-PDF library originally written in Java and ported to C# under the name iTextSharp. It is published under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) as alternative license.
iText is not an end-user tool. It is a PDF engine developers can integrate in their web applications or products for creating and manipulating printable reports on-the-fly. However, to demonstrate the PDF manipulation functionality, a simple GUI was written: the iText toolbox.

The iText toolbox is a Java Swing application that was originally a part of the iText library. You can start it as an executable jar, or you can run it as a Java Webstart application. You’ll find it a useful tool to perform all kinds of PDF-related file manipulations: converting a directory of images to a PDF, concatenating existing PDFs, and so on...
Its initial purpose however, was to be a learning tool for developers.

The iText toolbox is a learning tool in the sense that developers can easily try out some of iText’s features before actually using the library in their applications. The idea was that they could look into the toolbox source code for inspiration. There was only one caveat: the license!

The MPL and the LGPL are very good licenses for libraries; but they weren’t exactly written for end-user products. LGPL applied to an end user aplication is the same as GPL. This in practice prevents the use of the toolbox as a learning tool because anything that you would like to pull to your closed source or proprietary application can’t be used without breaking the license.
For this reason, we decided to use a license for the toolbox that is different from the license for the core library, namely the MIT license. The MIT license is a very permissive free software license that allows the reuse in proprietary software. You can now use the source code of the toolbox as inspiration for your own applications without having to contribute any changes back to the community.
Note that this doesn’t mean the iText license has changed; the MPL/LGPL still apply to the core library.