[oXygen-user] Improving usability of bundled FOP

[Sorin Ristache]

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