fop n. a man who is excessively concerned with appearance and style. FOP is the world's first (but no longer only; see related links) print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects. It is a Java 1.1 application that reads a formatting object tree and then turns it into a PDF document. The formatting object tree, can be in the form of an XML document (output by an XSLT engine like XT) or can be passed in memory as a DOM Document or (in the case of XT) SAX events. Note that FOP is still alpha. It is slow, buggy and doesn't support much of the XSL spec. It's getting there, though. News11th October: Version 0.11.0 ReleasedMajor code changes.
The way in which the formatting object tree creates the area tree has radically changed to allow much easier support for keeps, etc in the future.
Numerous bugs were introduced (hence the delay in release) but even more fixed.
In particular, line breaks work within 2nd October: Mailing List for FOP DevelopersI am now running a mailing list at ONElist for people who want to help in the development of FOP. See http://www.onelist.com/community/fop-dev for details. 16th September: Version 0.10.0 ReleasedThis version is much faster. A 100-page test document that used to take 50 seconds in 0.9.x now takes 15 seconds. Some important bugs have been fixed. This version is approaching actually being usable for real work. Very simple support for a tiny bit of SVG.
16th September: New Example: XSL Stylesheet for XHTMLExamples now includes the beginnings of an XSL stylesheet for XHTML. It is very experimental but hopefully useful. Comments encouraged. |