TUTORIALS

 Basics: Accessing modules

As easy as 1, 2, 3...

What are modules?

Instead of bundling every feature into one product, we decided to split individual features among a variety of functional modules. This approach has many benefits:

1. First of all, you get a lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) because you are acquiring only the features you need.  Each module is licensed separately and can be purchased individually.

2. Secondly, instead of our providing you with a huge compact library, we use modules to help us supply only the API features you need. This organization of modules results in a very fast development time - that is, we focus on what you need.

As of today, jPDF contains seven different modules:

Template	For anything related to form fields or image replacing.
Merger	For joining or splitting documents.
Creator	For drawing new figures or adding content to existing content.
Encryption	For restricting document access to a group of people and for ciphering contents.
Signer	For anything related to certificates and signatures.
Viewer	A pure Java PDF renderer.
Printer	For printing PDF content to printers or converting to other formats.

All these modules must be purchased separatly, except for Encryption which is bundled free of charge.

How to use modules

Modules can be accessed from any PdfDocument instance. The screen shot below shows the methods that are of interest.

Typically, the accessing of a module will look like this section of code:

// Open the Document:
PdfDocument doc = new PdfDocument("myFile.pdf");

// Recover the Creator module:
CreatorModule creator = doc.getCreatorModule();

// Do something with it...:
Page page = creator.createPage();

More information

That's all for this basic tutorial session.
You can get more information about specific modules by checking:

The tutorials sections
The api documentation