RE: XSL FO: FOP vs XEP

[David Tolpin <dvd@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert,

> Anyone comparing two programs to evaluate which one to use would certainly
> want to know the relative cost of the two, so you ought to add that to the
> chart. I realize that RenderX's pricing hasn't been worked out yet, but the
> fact that FOP is free and RenderX won't be is certainly relevant to such a
> comparison.

I'm really not sure that this marketing stanza is relevant to technology
issues discussed in xsl-list, but being free is not an excuse for being buggy.

 > 
> Likewise for the open source status of each of them. 
> 
> Also, if the word "FAILED" next to FOP's problem areas wasn't written in
> bright red all uppercase letters, the page wouldn't come across as such a
> blatantly biased marketing piece for RenderX.
> 

The word "FAILED" is not written in all capitals. It is written in
"capitalized" style: first letter is capital, the rest is small. You can
consider looking at the page again. It is written this way: "Failed". And in
red. We didn't write that all of the tests failed, by the way, we passed them
through our front-end instead to make tests sensible.

I just would like to mention, that before publishing the comparison in the
public list, I've posted a preliminary version of it to fop-dev, and made
several corrections to the final version just to be less biased.

And indeed, we ARE biased. And we are welcome everybody to assess quality
of  RenderX XSL Printing Engine in equally biased manner -- the engine is
available for evaluation free of charge.

There were some traces of lack of mutual understanding between us (RenderX
technical team) and FOP's  developers, but I hope that those traces were
dissappeared and by providing alternative solutions for the same problem, 
we move the world in the right direction. Correct me if I'm wrong.

David Tolpin
RenderX


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