FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is a print formatter driven by XSL Formatting Objects [1] and an output independent formatter. It is a Java application that reads a formatting object tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output. Output formats currently supported include PDF, PS, PCL, AFP, Print and PNG.

This beta release will be available for testing for some time, before a stable release is made. Feedback is welcome, and we would like to encourage as many people as possible to try it out and report bugs and issues on the fop-users mailing list [2]. The most important changes introduced by this release are:

• many bug fixes and improvements in tables, better support for keeps and breaks, new features: conditional borders and background on columns and header/footer/body;
• better image handling thanks to the new image loading framework provided by the Apache XML Graphics Commons dependency;
• improvements and bugfixes for font handling and font auto-detection/-registration;
• performance improvements and memory optimizations for the property handling in the FO tree.

Please note that support for Java 1.3 has been dropped. Only one type of binaries is provided now, that will run on 1.4+ JREs.

Other important release notes are available at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.95/releaseNotes_0.95beta.html

For a more complete list of changes, please visit http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.95/changes_0.95beta.html

For download information, see the following page: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/download.html

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-- The Apache XML Graphics team

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Apache XML Graphics Commons is a library that consists of several reusable components used by Apache Batik and Apache FOP. Many of these components can easily be used separately outside the domains of SVG and XSL-FO.

The most important addition in this release is an image loading framework which supports all sorts of different image formats (bitmap and vector) and is highly extensible.

Besides that, there were a larger number of smaller additions and bugfixes.

Support for Java 1.3 has been dropped. Java 1.4 or later is required now.

For a detailed list of changes, see http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/commons/changes.html

Source and binary distributions can be downloaded from the corresponding directories in an Apache Software Foundation mirror at: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/xmlgraphics/commons. See also the download page: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/commons/download.html

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-- The Apache XML Graphics Team

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• xml:id support (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-id/).
• ElementTraversal support (http://www.w3.org/TR/ElementTraversal/).
• Enhanced DOM Viewer window, contributed from Ivan Andjelkovic, a Google Summer of Code student.
• Official maven artifacts (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/xmlgraphics/).
• A separate Mac OS X Squiggle disk image distribution.

Batik can be downloaded from here:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/download.cgi

For the full list of improvements and bug fixes since version 1.7beta1, click on the release change log's link from that page.

If you find any problems, please file bug reports:

http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/

And for more information, see the Batik project website:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/

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-- The Apache Batik (XML Graphics) Team

]]> [ Category : Apache XML Graphics ]

FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is a print formatter driven by XSL Formatting Objects [1] and an output independent formatter. It is a Java application that reads a formatting object tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output. Output formats currently supported include PDF, PS, PCL, AFP, Print and PNG.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl11/

This is the second production-level release after the big re-design effort. It includes many bug fixes and new features, the most important being:

• auto-detection of the fonts installed on the system; the XML metrics generation is now optional;
• support for the collapsing-border model in tables;
• internal links in PDF now point to the exact location, and not to the top of the page;
• support for UAX#14 type line breaking. This annex of the Unicode standard specifies rules for breaking text into lines depending on the language used.

The complete list of changes is available at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.94/changes_0.94.html

FOP 0.94 implements the XSL-FO 1.1 recommendation to a high degree of compliance. See the compliance page for a detailed overview: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/compliance.html

For download information, see the following page: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/download.html

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-- The Apache XML Graphics team,

]]> [ Category : Apache XML Graphics ]

Apache XML Graphics Commons is a library that consists of several reusable components used by Apache Batik and Apache FOP. Many of these components can easily be used separately outside the domains of SVG and XSL-FO. You will find components such as a PDF library, an RTF library, Graphics2D implementations that let you generate PDF & PostScript files, and much more.

This release mainly adds support for CMYK and GRAY color spaces for PSGenerator. For a detailed list of changes, see http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/commons/changes.html

Source and binary distributions can be downloaded from the corresponding directories in an Apache Software Foundation mirror at: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/xmlgraphics/commons. See also the download page: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/commons/download.html

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-- The Apache XML Graphics Project

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• DOM Level 3 Core/Events/XPath support
• Improved WMF transcoder support
• Near complete SMIL Animation support
• A few SVG 1.2 features, such as:
  • resource documents
  • shapechange and RenderedBBoxChange events
  • SVGGlobal startMouseCapture/stopMouseCapture methods
  • handler elements

Batik can be downloaded from here:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/download.cgi

For the full list of improvements and bug fixes over version 1.6, click on the "release change log" link from that page.

The reasoning behind having a beta release rather than a full release is that there has been a great deal of changes since version 1.6, and while we believe the code to be reasonably stable, it would be beneficial to get feedback from users on any bugs that may have been missed. We plan to have a full 1.7 release in a month or two.

If you find any problems, please file bug reports:

http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/

And for more information, see the Batik project website:

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/

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-- The Apache Batik team (The Apache XML-Graphics Project)

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[ Category : Apache XML Graphics ]

The new codebase for FOP was started several years ago in order to achieve better compliance with the XSL-FO spec. After three alpha and beta releases, the new codebase has now reached production quality. Therefore we present version 0.93 as the successor of version 0.20.5, FOP's production grade version during the past years.

• FOP 0.93 contains the new API first introduced in release 0.92 beta. The preceding API has been removed.
• FOP 0.93 again contains many bug fixes and new features. See below for details.

Compliance
------------

FOP 0.93 implements the XSL 1.0 and 1.1 recommendations to a high degree of compliance. See the compliance page http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/compliance.html for a detailed overview.

Known issues
------------

The known issues of FOP 0.93 are listed at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/knownissues.html. Upgrading
---------

You will experience different behaviour compared to version 0.20.5. Please consult the "Upgrading" page (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/stable/upgrading.html) for details.

Major Changes in Version 0.93
-----------------------------

• Added support for the use of Open Type fonts.
• Support for the rgb-icc() function and for a proprietary cmyk() function (for device CMYK colors only through the PDF renderer so far).
• Enabled Copy/Paste from PDF content in Acrobat Reader for text using embedded TrueType fonts.
• Added support for PDF/A-1b and PDF/X-3:2003. (Note: this may still be a bit incomplete.)
• The Java2DRenderer (and therefore the print and bitmap renderers) is now offering the same quality as the PDF and PS renderers.
• Automatic support for all fonts available to the Java2D subsystem for all Java2D-descendant renderers (TIFF, PNG, print, AWT).

The long list of changes in this release is available at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.93/changes_0.93.html.

The long list of changes in this and earlier releases is available at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/changes.html.

The Apache FOP team asks you for your continued feedback on the software. We're also interested in success stories with the new release. So if the latest version works fine for you, please tell us. And if it doesn't, you may tell us as well, of course.

Release notes for older FOP versions can be found on: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/relnotes.html

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-- The Apache FOP team

]]> [ Category : Apache XML Graphics ]

Apache XML Graphics Commons is a library that consists of several reusable components used by Apache Batik and Apache FOP. Many of these components can easily be used separately outside the domains of SVG and XSL-FO. You will find components such as a PDF library, an RTF library, Graphics2D implementations that let you generate PDF and PostScript files, and much more.

Important changes are:

• A start was made of an XMP metadata framework.
• ImageWriter abstraction supports writing multi-page formats like TIFF.

See http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/commons/changes.html for the detailed list of changes.

Source and binary distributions can be downloaded from the corresponding directories in an Apache Software Foundation mirror at:
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/xmlgraphics/commons.

See also the download page:
http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/commons/download.html

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-- The Apache XMLGraphics Team

]]> [ Category : Apache XML ]
[ Category : Apache XML Graphics ]

It can be downloaded at: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/download.html

Apache FOP 0.92 contains a considerable amount of improvements, bugfixes and new features in comparison with last December's 0.91 release, so you're all probably wondering: Why *still* consider it a beta release?

The main reason for this is a fundamental modification in the API, which was motivated by the fact that a lot of resources could be reused for multiple rendering runs. It has, of course, all been rigorously tested, but still we'd very much appreciate any feedback, especially if one of you feels there is room for improvement, be it in the area of performance or user-friendliness. Every one of your comments will be carefully weighed and taken into consideration.

Due to this change, we urge you to check out the following page before starting to work with the new release: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.92/embedding.html

If all proceeds as planned, the next release will --finally, after some 3 years-- lose the beta-tag, since a lot of feedback and our own experiences now tell us this piece of software is ready for production environments.

On The Other Hand, if you take a look at the release notes at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/relnotes.html, you will still see a lot of open/known issues, so...

As always, code-heads are encouraged to download the sources, and start tinkering with it. Your ideas, good or bad, will be very very welcome. If you have a lot of free time and feel like joining us, all the better.

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-- Apache FOP development team

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The changes made since 0.91 alpha can be found here: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/changes.html

The following page contains the links to the various distributions: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/download.html

To those of you still using FOP 0.20.5 we would like to repeat the request to go ahead and try out the redesigned FOP. The more feedback we get, the more likely it becomes that certain features and enhancements will find their way into the codebase. If you encounter problems when upgrading, please check the following page first: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/0.91/upgrading.html

If the answer to your particular problem isn't mentioned there, the Apache FOP Team will be at your disposal on fop-users.AT.xmlgraphics.apache.org to help guide you to a working solution.

Code-grinders are, of course, always welcome to check out the source distribution and offer any ideas for enhancement and/or improvement on fop-dev.AT.xmlgraphics.apache.org.

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-- The Apache FOP Team

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[ Category : Apache XML Graphics ]

Apache XML Graphics Project is responsible for software licensed to the Apache Software Foundation intended for the creation & maintenance of:

• the conversion of XML formats to graphical output
• related software components

Apache XML Graphics Project currently consists of the following sub-projects, each focused on a different aspect of XML Graphics:

• Apache Batik - A toolkit for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), based in Java
• Apache FOP - A print formatter & renderer for XSL-FO (FO=formatting objects), based in Java

Jeremias Maerki is the first Chair of the Apache XML Graphics PMC (Project Management Committee).

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[ Category : Apache XML ]
[ Category : Apache XML Graphics ]