A World Of Documents

Seen in Lucerne last Saturday (2009-11-07). It was still like this when I came by again 8 hours later in the evening. I don’t think any comment is necessary.

Thanks to Jürgen for pointing this out to me!

I’m currently writing a basic XSL training course which I’ll give the first time later this month. I decided to write the training materials using DocBook 5. Lots of XML examples, lots of SVG illustrations painted in Inkscape. I used the DocBook editing capability of my OxygenXML editor. Finally, I’ve customized the DocBook XSL stylesheets a bit, added syntax highlighting using XSLTHL and used Apache FOP (SVN Trunk) to create the PDF.

I must say: it was simply fun to work with this setup. DocBook is well documented. The documentation always had an option for all of my wishes. No wasted time, no crashes, no despair (I pity those who do this with MS Word). I can only recommend to do any larger documentation work like this.

Java is great. Really. But there are sometimes subtleties that need to be kept in mind as I had to find out in the last few days once more. After looking in all the wrong places, that is. I’m talking about specifying a classpath. Multiple entries on the classpath are delimited by a separator but that separator is not always the same:

• JVM Classpath on Windows (semicolon): “-cp my1.jar;my2.jar”
• JVM Classpath on Unix (colon): “-cp my1.jar:my2.jar”
• Class-Path entry in a JAR manifest (space): “Class-Path: my1.jar my2.jar”
• OSGi’s Bundle-Classpath entry in a bundle manifest (comma): “Bundle-Classpath: .,META-INF/lib/my1.jar,META-INF/lib/my2.jar”

I’m sure someone will eventually come up with yet another separator for classpath entries.

With pleasure I learned today that IBM and Sun together launched http://odftoolkit.org/. It is at least partly seeded with code from Sun’s OpenOffice (namely the ODF Toolkit project). Initial components include ODFDOM (a low-level ODF API) and an ODF validator. Another very pleasant surprise is the publication of the source code under the liberal Apache License V2.0. Congratulations to the people involved!

This will make especially ODFDOM interesting for Apache FOP.  One of the missing puzzle pieces in FOP surely is an ODF output plug-in to replace the RTF format in the long run. Somehow I’ve got the feeling that we won’t have to wait all too long for that…

Matthew Hardy announced a new prerelease of the PDFXML Plug-in für Adobe Acrobat 9. PDFXML used to be called Mars and is a XML-friendly representation of PDF (borrowing heavily on SVG). Now only the project itself is still called Mars. I wonder if this is an indicator that Adobe will put more energy into promoting this new format in the future. I’ve already blogged about it some time ago.

I let it slide for too long but now, Barcode4J 2.0 is finally available. Since the last alpha release I’ve been able to fix a number of bugs in DataMatrix and PDF417. As a last-minute addition I’ve added support for the USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode of which you can see an example below.

There’s also a detailed list of changes for this release.

The Clematis on my balcony is in full bloom again. In the background, mount Pilatus still has a little bit of snow. But it’s getting less every day.

On days like today, it is really hard after a 5-minute break in Balconia to go back into the home office just because the notebook display isn’t bright enough to work outside. Sigh.

I’ve been to Amsterdam a number of times and will go there again for ApacheCon EU 2008. I always took the train or night train. So, nine days before departure I look again into the best way to get there and back. But despite all the discussions about CO2 and all that, something is still very wrong with the picture I have to paint…

Read the rest of this entry »

Two days with buzzing activity. Interesting talks. Lots of FOSS projects presenting themselves. Free food, drinks and admission. On Wednesday evening Google sponsored a social event with food, drinks and lightning talks. LiSoG and /ch/open offered delicious cocktails under free license on Thursday. Ever present was the organic FreeBeer by project21 (it comes at a price but the recipe is under the Creative Commons License Attribution Share-Alike).

It’s unbelievable what these guys put together. Sometimes I had the impression that there was more interest in the OpenExpo than in the larger TopSoft that was held right beside the OpenExpo in the same hall.

For the ASF, Andreas Hartmann presented Lenya, Christian Geisert presented OfBiz and I FOP. On Thursday, I held a presentation on FOP and I was happy to have an almost full room. Many people indicated that they didn’t know FOP, yet. So, this was a really good opportunity to do a little promotion.

I had a nice long talk with Andreas Vox from the Scribus team about layout. It was interesting to learn how Scribus does line-breaking compared to FOP.

More photos should be available on the OpenExpo site shortly along with the presentations (videos plus slides).

I’ve got a 4 year old IBM ThinkPad X31 which served me very well. But it’s time now for a new notebook. I want something as small as my X31. It should be affordable but ideally have a better display. Yesterday, Lenovo announced the new ThinkPad X300. Hot!

Read the rest of this entry »