FOP 0.90 alpha 1 review

FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is the world's first print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO) and the world's fir

License: The Apache License 2.0 File size: 1315K Developer: FOP Development Team

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FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is the world's first print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO) and the world's first output independent formatter.

Formatting Objects Processor is a Java application that reads a formatting object (FO) tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output. Output formats currently supported include PDF, PCL, PS, SVG, XML (area tree representation), Print, AWT, MIF and TXT. The primary output target is PDF.

The goals of the Apache FOP project are to deliver an XSL-FO to PDF formatter that is compliant to at least the Basic conformance level described in the W3C Recommendation from 15 October 2001, and that complies with the 11 March 1999 Portable Document Format Specification (Version 1.3) from Adobe Systems.

Conformance to the XML 1.0 Recommendation, XSLT 1.0 Recommendation and the XML Namespaces Recommendation is understood. Other relevant documents, such as the XPath and XLink Working Drafts, are referenced as necessary. The FOP Project will attempt to use the latest version of evolving specifications.
The FOP layout system is currently being rewritten to better support the XSL-FO standard.

What's New in This Release:
This is the first preview release after the big redesign effort.
We would like to encourage you to download the code and to play with it. We're still in the process of adding new major features and stabilizing the code. We welcome any feedback you might have and even more, any other form of help to get the project forward.

Caveats:

This release is a (unstable) preview release and not intended for use in a production environment. Use at your own risk!
The API is not to be considered stable, yet. Please be prepared for the API to be changed in a backwards-incompatible way.
You may experience different behaviour compared to version 0.20.5. Please consult the "Upgrading" page indicated above for details.

Known Issues:

PCL, MIF and SVG support have not been restored, yet.
Java2D/AWT support contains some problems, for example with block-containers.
Support for kerning has not been restored, yet.
Auto table layout is not implemented, yet.
The collapsing border model on tables is not implemented, yet. Please use border-collapse="separate" for now.
Footnotes may overlap with text of the region-body in multi-column documents.
Space resolution does not work between footnote regions.
There's a problem involving nested block-containers and reference-orientation 180/-180 (Bugzilla #36391)
block-containers with no height currently don't create a fence for spaces as they should (they behave like a normal block).
Preserved linefeeds in fo:character are not handled correctly.
Zero-width spaces are not handled correctly.
An empty block currently produces a fence for stacking constraints which it shouldn't.
There are several small problems around white space handling.
Images currently don't shrink so they fit on a page when they are too big and shrinking is allowed to happen.
Block-level content in fo:inlines may produce unwelcome results.
inline-container may not work as expected.
letter-spacing and word-spacing properties may not work as expected.
leaders with leader-pattern="use-content" may not work as expected.
keep-with-previous doesn't work inside tables and lists, yet.
White space on direct inline-level children of a marker is not handled correctly.
If two consecutive pages don't have the same available width, the content currently isn't properly fit into the available space on the new page.
background-images on page-number-citations are not placed correctly.
Not all FO elements can be referenced by their "id", most notably: table-body, table-header, table-footer and table-row.
The backgrounds of table-body, table-header, table-footer and table-column are not painted, yet.
Border and padding conditionality are not supported on table-cells, yet.
Copy/Paste from PDF content in Acrobat Reader is not supported for text using embedded TrueType fonts.
Column balancing in multi-column documents may not work as expected (Bugzilla #36356)
Omitting fo:table-column or having fo:table-column without a column-width and attempting to create columns implicitly from the first table row is not implemented, yet (Bugzilla #35656).
Leaders with the "rule" pattern don't work for PostScript output.