Installing iText Community for .NET developers

How to install iText Community .NET version

Thank you for your interest in our open-source PDF library, we hope you will enjoy using our product and share your experiences with us and the iText community. We will walk you through the installation process, from downloading iText Community to adding the dependency to your .NET build tool.

If you require any extra help please have a look at our FAQs or the community discussion at StackOverflow. If you are interested in getting support from our in-house developers and/or a license key for commercial iText products, you will need to acquire a commercial license.

Before you install

• Make sure you have read and agreed upon the AGPL license. All downloads we offer open-source come with the AGPL license model.

• Important remark: In our installation guides, we use NuGet as a build tool for .NET. - iText Community

Installation

Automated dependency management

iText Community is available on NuGet. If you need all iText Community modules, you can install them with a single NuGetPackage by typing the following command in the NuGet Package Manager: Install-Package itext. You will also need to install the Bouncy Castle Adapter, by issuing the following command: Install-Package itext.bouncy-castle-adapter (as the kernel module has it as a dependency).

Using sign functionality

All the necessary bouncy-castle related classes are grouped into two modules: bouncy-castle-adapter and bouncy-castle-fips-adapter.

One of these modules is required to be in a classpath for the correct usage of cryptographic and signatures-related logic of our kernel and sign modules.

It is important not to add them both as a dependency since they are not compatible.

itext.bouncy-castle-adapter NuGet package encapsulates bouncy-castle related classes for this NuGet dependency:

• BouncyCastle.Cryptography

The itext.bouncy-castle-adapter previously relied upon the Portable.BouncyCastle dependency. However, as of the release of iText version 8.0.2, we transitioned to use the newer BouncyCastle.Cryptography package officially maintained by the Legion of the Bouncy Castle Inc.

itext.bouncy-castle-fips-adapter NuGet package encapsulates bouncy-castle related classes for these two assemblies (dlls taken from https://www.bouncycastle.org/fips-csharp/):

• bc-fips

• bcpkix-fips

Since those two dll files are not signed, we can't use them with .NET Framework and therefore the only supported target framework for bouncy-castle-fips-adapter project is netstandard2.0.

You can read more about it here.

Using the iText Artifactory Server

iText NuGet packages are also available on the iText Artifactory server. You can add it as a custom NuGet repository to Visual Studio. In the NuGet Package Manager, go to the settings and add the following URL as a package source: https://repo.itextsupport.com/api/nuget/nuget. You can also browse the iText Artifactory server and download NuGet packages manually.

After Installation

Check out the .NET jump-start tutorial and helpful code examples here on the Knowledge Base, or you can find our API documentation in the Resources section of our website.

iText Core .NET on GitHub

• The source code is available on GitHub.

• You can download the modules (.nupkg) of iText Community in a single ZIP file for the .NET version of iText Community. 

• Developers can clone the following git projects to access the source code for the .NET version of iText Community.

Adding our iText open-source add-ons

If you would like to add one of our open-source add-ons, please first have a look at the compatibility matrix and the installation guides of each of these add-ons.