Release of FOP Version 0.8.1


Date:     Sat, 17 Jul 1999 16:36:13 +0800
From:     James Tauber <jtauber@jtauber.com>
To:       XSL-List@mulberrytech.com
Subject:  FOP 0.8.1 released

FOP http://www.jtauber.com/fop/

WHAT'S CHANGED? (THE SHORT ANSWER)

Mostly bug fixes relating to lists as well as some other things.

WHAT IS FOP?

FOP is the world's first (but no longer only) print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects. It is a Java 1.1 application that reads a formatting object tree and then turns it into a PDF document. The formatting object tree, can be in the form of an XML document (output by an XSLT engine like XT) or can be passed in memory as a DOM Document.

Note that FOP is still alpha. It is slow, buggy and doesn't support much of the XSL spec. It's getting there, though.

WHAT'S CHANGED? (MORE DETAIL)

If unknown metric for a particular character, assumes with of "N". Page breaks between blocks within blocks produce the right number of block areas on the new page. PDF more heavily commented for testing purposes. Version class implemented for consistency within Cocoon. Null display spaces not represented in PDF. Made XML output of areas/spaces pretty-printed. Removed some old XML output code that wasn't used. Fixed bug where half-leading display spaces were put in for block areas with no lines. Fixed bug that labels take up block-progression space in addition to body. If first word in line won't fit, it now overruns rather than goes into infinite loop (code for truncation in there too, but currently commented out). provisional-distance-between-starts and provisional-label-separation are now actually used for lists.

[Note: 'Sun, 18 Jul 1999':
A few more bug fixes...
* embedded running of XT now works when document has a DTD
* \ is correctly escaped in PDF (can't believe it wasn't before)
* one lone character > 127 is now supported, namely 0x2022 (bullet)
* you can use font-family "Helvetica" "Times" and "Courier" as well as generic family names
]


James
James Tauber / jtauber@jtauber.com / www.jtauber.com
Maintainer of : www.xmlinfo.com,  www.xmlsoftware.com and www.schema.net

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