Andrew Welch wrote:
Has anyone started out with FOP and then had to 'upgrade' to a
commercial processor for any reason?
If you need to process documents in "difficult" langauges such as
Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, then FOP is not an option as it doesn't
provide either right-to-left writing mode or Thai glyph shaping (in
fact, only XSL Formatter provides Thai glyph shapping, so if you have a
Thai requirement, XSL Formatter is your only choice at the moment). I
don't believe it does Arabic glyph shaping either, although it might.
In my experience so far using XSL-FO for publishing of localized
documents it appears that Thai composition is the hardest problem and I
think Antenna House have more than earned their license charge for the
considerable effort they've put into implementing Thai composition. For
commercial enterprises that must provide documents in most of the
world's national languages the license cost for XSL Formatter or XEP is
a tiny fraction of the total cost of producing documents and is a
tremendous value in terms of process simplification, standardization,
and quality assurance. As far as I know, support for Thai is the only
major difference between XSL Formatter and XEP with respect to support
for non-Western languages, although XSL Formatter does implement some
extensions for Japanese typographic conventions not provided for in XSL
FO 1.0.
But if you don't have this type of internationalization/localization
requirement, then FOP may well be able to meet your requirements. And if
you are not a for-profit enterprise then of course the value equation
may be quite different.
When compared with other common and powerful tools used in document
production tool chains, such as Enfocus' PitStop Server, the license
fees for XSL Formatter and XEP are quite reasonable. And when compared
to older legacy SGML-supporting composition systems, which tended to
start 100K dollars US back in the day, quite a bargain.
The hidden cost of FOP is the cost of maintenance, bugs, and
nonconformance. I know that the FOP team is working hard to correct
these issues and I hope that they succeed, because the FO user community
needs a solid, open-source implementation. Such an implementation will
not significantly erode the market for commercial FO implementations
because those implementations will always be able to provide additional
value that is worth paying for.
Cheers,
Eliot
--
W. Eliot Kimber
Professional Services
Innodata Isogen
9030 Research Blvd, #410
Austin, TX 78758
(512) 372-8122
eliot@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.innodata-isogen.com
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