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iText Core/Community 9.7.0

Our third iText Core release of 2026 brings some significant new capabilities. We've added support for the WebP image format, introduced dynamic page margins and footnotes to the layout module, and strengthened decompression bomb protection. We've also improved append mode reliability and updated several security-related dependencies.

WebP Image Format Support

iText now natively supports the WebP image format, developed by Google to provide superior lossless and lossy compression for web images. This new capability allows you to integrate high-quality, highly compressed modern web images directly into your PDF workflows, significantly reducing file sizes without sacrificing visual fidelity.

Our implementation uses the TwelveMonkeys ImageIO library for WebP decoding on Java and is delivered as a separate, optional module: webp-image-support. When the module is present on the classpath, iText Core automatically detects and processes WebP images without requiring any additional configuration.

Capabilities

• Automatic WebP image type detection via ImageTypeDetector
• Lossy and lossless WebP image decoding
• ICC color profile handling for accurate color reproduction
• Transparency (alpha channel) support
• Base64-encoded WebP images in HTML/SVG sources

Notes/Limitations

• For animated WebP images only the first frame will be rendered.
• The rotation property is not (yet) supported, but browsers currently ignore this anyway.
• The module is not currently supported on Android, due to the javax.awt and imageio decoding libraries not being available.

Dynamic Margins & Footnotes

We have completely overhauled the way iText handles complex document layouts. This not only allows developers to adjust page margins on the fly, but also includes footnote support with automatic numbering, customizable footnote containers, and intelligent layout logic that ensures footnote anchors and text remain perfectly positioned.

To achieve this, we have introduced a powerful new framework for managing complex document layouts. This overhaul allows developers to adjust page margins on the fly using the new SectionBreak element. Additionally, we’ve launched comprehensive footnote support, enabling automatic numbering, customizable footnote containers, and intelligent layout logic that ensures footnote anchors and text remain perfectly positioned.

Signatures and Validation

We’ve resolved critical issues related to Append Mode, ensuring that incremental updates to PDF documents are more reliable. This includes better tracking of modified objects and fixing stream inconsistencies, allowing for a more robust document history and preservation of digital signatures.

Page rotation handling for signature layers is also improved, and we fixed some edge-case crashes during form flattening.

To ensure uninterrupted support for digital signature validation, we have released a new version of our EU Trusted Lists resources. This update incorporates the recently updated European Journal sources, maintaining compliance with the latest eIDAS standards.

Security and Stability

iText’s protection against "decompression bombs" inside PDF streams has been enhanced, particularly for single /FlateDecode streams and image-based decompression bombs. The change applies a 100× growth factor limit to all streams by default. Note that the existing API to override protection remains in place, in cases where edge cases may trigger false positives. However, this should be extremely unlikely for real-world uses cases.

Additionally, we have implemented a high-level safety mechanism to detect and terminate infinite layout loops, and the Jackson JSON dependency for Java has been bumped from 2.21.2 to at least 2.22.0 to resolve CVE issues.

Pull Requests

For this release we've incorporated two pull requests. The first is from iText alumni Dmitry Radchuk to add support for the :is() and :where() selectors for the styled-xml-parser module utilized by the pdfHTML add-on. Therefore, full details can be found in the pdfHTML 6.3.3 release notes.

The other pull request comes from Netliomax25 who proposed a way to increase security in iText’s PDF/UA accessibility checks, specifically for rich text inside annotations. The fix swaps in a hardened XML parser to block potential XML External Entity injection attacks.

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• bf7a554 [RELEASE] iText 9.7.0
• 7b3e713 Don't layout absolutely positioned wrappers in other absolutely positioned wr...
• 7919d66 [RELEASE] 9.7.0
• b6bcf59 Bump jackson dependency to 2.22.0
• 6f9282f Support absolutely positioned elements recalculation when certain axis coordi...
• a07fcb8 Add missing copyright headers
• 183208f Fix sign module tests in new graalvm
• d6ff980 Add ability to ignore area break and section break using properties
• 137f9ad Fix partial and nothing layout result handling for FootnoteAnchorRenderer
• 8c6b430 Introduce tagging for footnotes
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