[PDFBOX-4538] Expose more internal API as protected and public

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.14
• Component/s: Parsing, Rendering, Writing
• Labels: pull-request-available
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jonathan
• Created: 09/May/19 11:23
• Updated: 09/May/19 12:00

Description

During the last couple of weeks, I worked intensely on PDFBox-based, heavy PDF processing.
In the course of this work, we often needed to customize some behaviour of the library, but we haven't been able to do this as an extension by subclassing. Instead, we needed to fork the entire project, with the majority of changes being the use of less restrictive access modifiers.

As a company we would like to reduce the scope of our own modifications, so it'd be great if you could adopt a somewhat less restrictive policy on exposing API area. I could compile a list of the symbols we needed, but perhaps it would make sense to undergo a more general review about what internals could be opened as public API.

We also implemented some other fixes, I will open separate issues to address them.