A World Of Documents

Finally, a FOP release after the redesign without a beta tag! The most important changes since 0.92 beta besides a lot of bugfixing and stabilization work:

• Added support for the use of Open Type fonts.
• Support for the rgb-icc() function and for a proprietary cmyk() function (for device CMYK colors only through the PDF renderer so far).
• Enabled Copy/Paste from PDF content in Acrobat Reader for text using embedded TrueType fonts.
• Added support for PDF/A-1b and PDF/X-3:2003. (Note: this may still be a bit incomplete.)
• The Java2DRenderer (and therefore the print and bitmap renderers) is now offering the same quality as the PDF and PS renderers.
• Automatic support for all fonts available to the Java2D subsystem for all Java2D-descendant renderers (TIFF, PNG, print, AWT).

When I found out today, that Apache Harmony now publishes snapshot binaries for Windows, I just had to download one immediately and run Apache FOP under that VM. And guess what, the simple “readme.fo” example from FOP ran just fine. My second attempt with “images.fo”, however, didn’t work (problems with ImageIO and color profiles). Anyway, this means I shall keep an eye on compatibility with Apache Harmony while developing from now on.

One little thing I had to change in FOP to get a little problem was to replace the “UnicodeBig” encoding with “UTF-16BE” in FontFileReader.java (reads TTF files), as “UnicodeBig” doesn’t seem to be available, yet.

Now, I’ll have to set up Harmony for debugging in Eclipse. That, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to work just like that.