Re: [xsl] status of FOP, Oct 2006

Subject: Re: [xsl] status of FOP, Oct 2006
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2006 12:31:10 -0400
Dear Florent (or Georges as the case may be :-),

  Here is the response of Simon Pepping, a FOP developer (he didn't
succeed to post directly to XSL List):

    The FOP development team encourages all users of FOP to upgrade
    to version 0.92. Soon we hope to follow up with version 0.93,
    which we believe to be of production quality. You can check the
    coverage of the XSL-FO spec on FOP's compliance page
    http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/compliance.html. Besides a
    greater coverage of the XSL-FO spec, FOP 0.9x has a better
    layout engine. It uses the famous Knuth algorithm both for line
    breaking and page breaking. For other features see the overview
    at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/latest/index.html, menu
    item 'features'.

    Because this version is in active development, contrary to the
    "latest stable release" 0.20.5, reported bugs are fixed, and
    new features are being implemented continually. Better font
    support is on the short term todo list.

These are all excellent reasons to go with 0.92 beta for "real work", but are less compelling for a classroom scenario, where:


(a) the maintenance/upgrade cycle is different (and hopefully slower)
(b) bugs and shortcomings can be learning opportunities rather than drop-dead problems (especially when learning XSL and other formatters are on hand to compare)


Nevertheless, this is valuable information and we can definitely use it -- even if we still go with 0.20.5 on classroom machines for now, we'll tell students not to take it home but get the newer one. :-)

Cheers,
Wendell

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