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What's New in v4

This year marks 20 years of PDFxStream's growth and maturity in providing top-notch PDF data extraction capabilities to Java programmers, and we're thrilled to deliver this fourth major revision with a long-awaited major feature expansion.

Right-to-left (RTL) and bidirectional (bidi) text handling​

PDFxStream v4 introduces support for (properly) extracting right-to-left (RTL) and bidirectional (bidi) text from PDF documents.

People have been asking for RTL support since PDFxStream's first beta phase back in 2004, and now it is here, delivering automatic, accurate handling of RTL and bidi text. As with PDFxStream's other capabilities, its RTL/bidi support just does the right thing without any special configuration or tweaking. In fact, nearly all existing code that uses PDFxStream v3 for text extraction can drop in v4 with no changes at all, and get out properly-ordered RTL & bidi text.

Read more about PDFxStream's RTL & bidi support in our documentation.

Subscription licensing & price reductions​

PDFxStream has always been licensed in what is now an "old school" way, via perpetual licenses and yearly technical support enrollments. This has increasingly been a point of friction for potential users and existing customers alike.

So, with v4, PDFxStream is now available under now-familiar subscription terms, without migrating to a far-flung cloud service, and with all of your documents and extracted data remaining safely in your computing environment and in your control. A side benefit of this change has been that we've radically reduced prices, with first-year costs for a new license subscription dropping by 41%-58%, depending on the subscription type.

Existing customers may continue to purchase licenses under the old v3 terms and rates (though there are very few cases where doing so makes sense).

Check out PDFxStream's new lower pricing.

Java runtime upgrade​

PDFxStream now requires Java 11 (or higher).

Product integration​

Previously, PDFxStream consisted of a suite of capabilities, sold separately, one for each kind of data one needed to extract from PDF documents. Now with v4, PDFxStream is a single, unified API, with all capabilities included for every kind of data found in PDFs.

Upgrading​

If you are an existing PDFxStream customer, the process of upgrading to v4 is very straightforward:

  1. Download / install the new release in your project.
  2. Switch out your v3 license file(s) for the new v4 license file(s) we have provided to you (the v4 library will not recognize v3 license files). If you believe you have not received your new license file(s), please contact us and we'll get you set up.
  3. Deploy!

There are no breaking changes between v3 and v4. Upgrading is easy!

If you've gotten this far, now take the next step and give PDFxStream v4 a try!

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