The title says it all. Today we’re announcing that PDFTextStream is free for academic use: read the press release, and if you are a qualifying academic developer, go ahead and apply for a free PDFTextStream license file.
Don’t worry, the application “process” will take you 2 minutes, and assuming you are eligible (i.e. a student, faculty, academic researcher, or university IT staff), you’ll get your free PDFTextStream license file within a week. Why a week? Well, we want to set expectations properly, as we assume we’ll get a pretty solid barrage of applications — after all, everyone likes free stuff.
I’m hoping that this will make life easier for many, especially those who are building truly cool new search, content management, and other webby and/or document-oriented processing systems. Too often, we’ve run across university-funded researchers who have bare-metal budgets, and are forced to use substandard tools and libraries (but who still manage to build amazing technologies). PDF is obviously important (and will only become more prevalent), so making sure those folks can get the best PDF content extraction library available at no cost to them will hopefully enable even greater, faster progress.
It’s the very least we can do to “give back”.
