And to add to this: for the other side of the equation (watermarking/backgrounds, joining, splitting, pdf to img) use Apache's PDFBox I've been through so many

And to add to this: for the other side of the equation (watermarking/backgrounds, joining, splitting, pdf to img) use Apache's PDFBox I've been through so many combinations of fop/flyingsaucer/wkhtmltopdf/phantom and pdftk/mcpdf/qpdf over the last decade.... but it seems we're finally about to solve this problem...