PDF Box generating blank images due to JBIG2 Images in it

Installing the JAI seems not needed. I only needed to download the levigo-jbig2-imageio-1.6.5.jar, place it in the folder of my dependency-jars and in eclipse add it to the java build path libraries. https://github.com/levigo/jbig2-imageio/

I had the exact same problem. I downloaded the jar from jbig2-imageio and I just included it in my project's application libraries, and it worked right out of the box. As adam said, it uses GPL3.

I had the same problem and I fixed it by adding this dependency in my pom.xml :

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
    <artifactId>jbig2-imageio</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.2</version>
</dependency>

Good luck.

Take a look at this ticket in PDFBox https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PDFBOX-1067 . I think the answer to your question is:

1. to make sure that you have JAI and the JAI-ImageIO plugins installed for your version of Java: decent installation instructions are available here: http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/production/java.html
2. to use the JBIG2-imageio plugin, (newer versions are licensed under the Apache2 license) https://github.com/levigo/jbig2-imageio/