Improving usability of bundled FOP
Hi, quality of FOP improved over the past years and in many situations it's viable option to commercial engines like XEP and Antenna House. However oXygen by default provides FOP with its default configuration which is not that useful for real work. I see two main issues: 1) Only standard 14 fonts are supported and these fonts are not containing glyphs used outside Western Europe scripts. With the recent versions of FOP solution is easy. By using configuration file with <auto-detect/> directive inside <fonts> element all locally installed fonts are available to FOP. Users are not forced to register fonts manually and generate metrics as in a past. 2) FOP doesn't contain hyphenation patterns. They can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/offo/files/latest/download?source=dlp (file with patterns is fop-hyph.jar and it's sufficient to put it on a classpath). I think it would be great if future releases of oXygen can contain this additional library with hyphenation patterns and enable fonts by providing custom configuration file out of the box. Thanks, Jirka -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jirka Kosek e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz http://xmlguru.cz ------------------------------------------------------------------ Professional XML consulting and training services DocBook customization, custom XSLT/XSL-FO document processing ------------------------------------------------------------------ OASIS DocBook TC member, W3C Invited Expert, ISO JTC1/SC34 rep. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Bringing you XML Prague conference http://xmlprague.cz ------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi, In our internal tests with an older version of Apache FOP the <auto-detect/> directive in the FOP configuration file did not work very well to detect and use the system fonts. We will test it again with the latest FOP version. If it detects the system fonts correctly and helps to avoid generating and registering the font metrics manually we will surely add it in the Oxygen installation for the platforms where it works (Windows, Mac, Linux). The problem with the OFFO hyphenation patterns library was always the license terms, for both the old hyphenation files (for older versions of Apache FOP, before the FOP redesign in version 1.0) and the new ones. Now we include in Oxygen a recent version of FOP so we should care only about the new hyphenation files. But each source file of the new hyphenation patterns includes a different set of license terms. It is true that some files have the same license but we would have to check each source file to make sure it is compatible with a commercial application. For example we do not and we will not include in Oxygen any GPL licensed library. Regards, Sorin http://www.oxygenxml.com Jirka Kosek wrote:
Hi,
quality of FOP improved over the past years and in many situations it's viable option to commercial engines like XEP and Antenna House. However oXygen by default provides FOP with its default configuration which is not that useful for real work.
I see two main issues:
1) Only standard 14 fonts are supported and these fonts are not containing glyphs used outside Western Europe scripts. With the recent versions of FOP solution is easy. By using configuration file with <auto-detect/> directive inside <fonts> element all locally installed fonts are available to FOP. Users are not forced to register fonts manually and generate metrics as in a past.
2) FOP doesn't contain hyphenation patterns. They can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/offo/files/latest/download?source=dlp (file with patterns is fop-hyph.jar and it's sufficient to put it on a classpath).
I think it would be great if future releases of oXygen can contain this additional library with hyphenation patterns and enable fonts by providing custom configuration file out of the box.
Thanks,
Jirka
On 11.10.2013 11:39, Sorin Ristache wrote:
hyphenation patterns includes a different set of license terms. It is true that some files have the same license but we would have to check each source file to make sure it is compatible with a commercial application. For example we do not and we will not include in Oxygen any GPL licensed library.
Oh, I forgot about potential licensing issues. Many patterns are still taken or derived from ones from TeX and GPL licensed. Jirka -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jirka Kosek e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz http://xmlguru.cz ------------------------------------------------------------------ Professional XML consulting and training services DocBook customization, custom XSLT/XSL-FO document processing ------------------------------------------------------------------ OASIS DocBook TC member, W3C Invited Expert, ISO JTC1/SC34 rep. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Bringing you XML Prague conference http://xmlprague.cz ------------------------------------------------------------------
On Fri, October 11, 2013 2:15 pm, Jirka Kosek wrote:
On 11.10.2013 11:39, Sorin Ristache wrote:
hyphenation patterns includes a different set of license terms. It is true that some files have the same license but we would have to check each source file to make sure it is compatible with a commercial application. For example we do not and we will not include in Oxygen any GPL licensed library.
Oh, I forgot about potential licensing issues. Many patterns are still taken or derived from ones from TeX and GPL licensed.
Which could be handled by someone hosting an external add-on containing the problematic files and the FOP configuration including the directories where the files would be once they are installed. Regards, Tony Graham tgraham@mentea.net Consultant http://www.mentea.net Mentea 13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- XML, XSL-FO and XSLT consulting, training and programming Chair, Print and Page Layout Community Group @ W3C
participants (3)
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Jirka Kosek -
Sorin Ristache -
Tony Graham