Release iText Core 9.3.0

As always, we’ve made the Core release notes into a showcase PDF document. Not only does it conform to the latest PDF/UA-2 standard for accessible PDF documents, as well as the PDF/A-4F archiving standard, it’s also digitally signed. You can find the source code and resources required to recreate the document yourself embedded. Have fun!

Release date: Sep 2nd, 2025

For this Q3 release of iText Core we’ve further enhanced iText’s digital signature validation by adding support for the official EU eIDAS Trusted Lists. Not only that, there’s also improvements to thread safeness and further work on the .NET MAUI support we introduced in version 9.2.0.

EU Trusted Lists in Validation

Furthering our efforts to make developers' lives easier when dealing with PDF digital signatures, we’re pleased to announce that iText now supports retrieval, validation, and usage of the EU’s List of Trusted Lists (LOTL). This greatly simplifies the process of establishing a chain of trust for electronic signatures, and helps ensure that signatures validated with iText meet stringent European standards for trust and authenticity.

For those unaware, the LOTL is a central, signed XML file containing links to trusted lists from EU and EEA Member States. These Member State lists identify both trust service providers and the trust services they offer; e.g. digital signatures and seals. The LOTL is an official resource which aids achieving compliance with EU eIDAS regulations. Previously, you would need to manually provide the trusted certificates to use for validation with iText; which is still possible, but is less convenient. Now, iText will retrieve, parse, and validate the LOTL to provide the root trusted certificates for you.

For security reasons, rather than expect iText to repeatedly retrieve the trusted certificates to validate the LOTL from the Internet, we instead provide a specialized repository which has the required certificates pre-downloaded. This can be found on GitHub, or alternatively on Maven and NuGet.

See European Union List of Trusted Lists in Validation to find full details on this implementation and its usage.

Thread Safety Improvements

Internal updates have improved thread safety across key components, making iText Core more robust in multithreaded environments. This is especially beneficial for developers building scalable, concurrent applications.

Faster XMP Metadata Parsing on .NET

.NET performance improvements include replacing for loops with foreach loops. The iText.Kernel.XMP.Impl.ParseRdf class is heavily used in XML-based metadata parsing, and the change significantly speeds up processing of large XMP collections.

Improved .NET MAUI Compatibility

Building on the support for Native AOT compilation in the previous release, iText Core now offers better compatibility with .NET MAUI, supporting cross-platform mobile and desktop development and integration into modern .NET applications.

Pull Requests

We’d like to thank SangeethaDivya for their contribution to remove duplicate constants on .NET, which we used as a basis for a Java reimplementation and ported it to .NET. Thanks also to craffael who fixed a typo in the PDFA-1 checking code which led to documents with no device-dependent color spaces failing the checks.

Bug Fixes and Miscellaneous

A bug in PDF 2.0 structure destinations has been fixed, improving how tagged content is linked and navigated when converting from HTML. This is now more in line with the PDF 2.0 and PDF/UA-2 specifications and is particularly useful for accessibility and structured document workflows.

We’ve also fixed an issue related to color depth support in PDF image data streams, which would result in an com.itextpdf.io.exceptions.IOException: The color depth 1 is not supported. error.

We’ve also resolved a StackOverflowException resulting from invalid PDFs with cyclic references in the trailer dictionary, improving robustness and error handling.

Other Stuff

If you use iText for digital signing, you may be interested in the Digital Signatures Hub which contains a ton of useful resources and examples.

Don’t forget that in addition to the resources on our Knowledge Base, on our GitHub you can find a ton of useful up-to-date samples in the following repos:

Java

• https://github.com/itext/itext-publications-examples-java

• https://github.com/itext/itext-publications-book-java

• https://github.com/itext/itext-publications-signing-examples-java

• https://github.com/itext/itext-publications-signatures-java

• https://github.com/itext/itext-publications-highlevel-java

• https://github.com/itext/itext-publications-jumpstart-java

.NET

• https://github.com/itext/itext-publications-samples-dotnet

If you want to create ZUGFeRD/Factur-X-e-invoices with iText Core, we have both Java and .NET code samples available targeting the current ZUGFeRD/Factur-X specification. They demonstrate how to embed the XML invoice data and add the metadata required for conformance. Read this article to learn more about ZUGFeRD/Factur-X, and using these code samples to create EN 16931-compatible e-invoices.

Bear in mind that our master branch contains samples for the current stable release, while the default develop branch is for the bleeding edge commits towards the next release.

Also, don’t forget to check out the release-related examples below, as well as the updated Core add-ons in the iText Suite we’ve released this time:

iText Suite 9.3 Releases

Release Related Examples

Downloads

Changelog

Deprecation of Older iText Versions

We're taking this opportunity to announce End of Life dates for deprecated iText versions. EOL for iText 7.1 will be April 2025, and iText 7.2 will be October 2025. As for iText 8.0, this will reach EOL in October 2026.

EOL for these versions means they will transition to maintenance mode, and only receive security patches. However, just as with iText 5 we will continue to provide support for our customers. Even though iText 5 has been in maintenance mode since 2016, we regularly release new versions to address CVEs and other security-related bugfixes. See CVEs or the iText 5-specific CVEs page for more information.

eBooks

Installation Instructions

Examples (latest ones)

FAQ (latest ones)