Writing
FOP 0.93 improves PDF from XML !
13/01/07 05:40
After nearly 3.5 years, the Apache Foundation has released a stable update to their FOP software. This is great news for people using this free java program to convert XML to PDF files. More information and the download can be found at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ Among the many changes and fixes are the following.
support for the use of Open Type fonts
support for SVG in fo:instream-foreign objects for RTF output
support for PDF/A-1b and PDF/X-3:2003
support for kerning
support for XMP metadata
lots of bug fixes
including a complete redesign of the FOP codebase
I did have some problems following their instructions to install my own fonts. Here is what I finally did after copying the fonts I wanted to the FOP directory. NOTE, with this release you can skip step one and go straight to step 2 if you are using a TTF font.
Correct font conversion process after copying the font files "something.ttf" to the directory where FOP is located.
C:\downloads\fop-0.93>java -cp build\fop.jar;lib\avalon-framework-4.2.0.jar; lib\commons-logging-1.0.4.jar; lib\commons-io-1.1.jar org.apache.fop.fonts.apps.TTFReader arial.ttf arial.xml
TTF Reader for Apache FOP 0.93Parsing font...
Reading arial.ttf...
Number of glyphs in font: 1674
3 cmap tables
CMAP format: 4
Creating xml font file...
Creating CID encoded metrics...
Writing xml font file arial.xml...
This font contains no embedding license restrictions.XML font metrics file successfully created.
Uncomment this in the userconfig.xml file in the fop directory "conf"; if you are using a TTF font you can also delete the "font metrics-url=" portion for each font as this will be generated automatically.
In the fonts.fo file located in the fop directory/examples/fo/basic, wherever you see font-family="Helvetica" change it to font-family="Arial".
C:\downloads\fop-0.93>fop -c conf/userconfig.xml C:\downloads\fop-0.93\examples\fo\basic\fonts.fo fonts2.pdf
Now there is finally a new stable release to export my docbook xml files with. If only they could get the floats feature working. PS, I have a package of tools for working with fop and xml docbook on Windows if anyone is interested.
support for the use of Open Type fonts
support for SVG in fo:instream-foreign objects for RTF output
support for PDF/A-1b and PDF/X-3:2003
support for kerning
support for XMP metadata
lots of bug fixes
including a complete redesign of the FOP codebase
I did have some problems following their instructions to install my own fonts. Here is what I finally did after copying the fonts I wanted to the FOP directory. NOTE, with this release you can skip step one and go straight to step 2 if you are using a TTF font.
Correct font conversion process after copying the font files "something.ttf" to the directory where FOP is located.
C:\downloads\fop-0.93>java -cp build\fop.jar;lib\avalon-framework-4.2.0.jar; lib\commons-logging-1.0.4.jar; lib\commons-io-1.1.jar org.apache.fop.fonts.apps.TTFReader arial.ttf arial.xml
TTF Reader for Apache FOP 0.93Parsing font...
Reading arial.ttf...
Number of glyphs in font: 1674
3 cmap tables
CMAP format: 4
Creating xml font file...
Creating CID encoded metrics...
Writing xml font file arial.xml...
This font contains no embedding license restrictions.XML font metrics file successfully created.
Uncomment this in the userconfig.xml file in the fop directory "conf"; if you are using a TTF font you can also delete the "font metrics-url=" portion for each font as this will be generated automatically.
<font metrics-url="arial.xml" kerning="yes" embed-url="arial.ttf">
<font-triplet name="Arial" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
<font-triplet name="ArialMT" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
</font>
<font kerning="yes" embed-url="arial.ttf">
<font-triplet name="Arial" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
<font-triplet name="ArialMT" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
</font> In the fonts.fo file located in the fop directory/examples/fo/basic, wherever you see font-family="Helvetica" change it to font-family="Arial".
C:\downloads\fop-0.93>fop -c conf/userconfig.xml C:\downloads\fop-0.93\examples\fo\basic\fonts.fo fonts2.pdf
Now there is finally a new stable release to export my docbook xml files with. If only they could get the floats feature working. PS, I have a package of tools for working with fop and xml docbook on Windows if anyone is interested.
Making pdf links with fop and docbook
03/10/05 03:33
Wow, all weekend I tried to get any PDF links using FOP 20.5 XSL Stylesheets 1.69 and olink (I needed olink since I had broken my book into chapter.xml files). Links to within the same .xml orignal file worked but as soon as I tried to cross link to another section... no link.
All I wanted was clickable cross links in my PDF to other sections in a PDF document. It works great when you have one single XML document and link things with xref and link but as soon as you try and get fancy and break out the chapters into their own chapter.xml files and then put them together as a book things get nightmarish.
Once I had broken everything up into their own XML files I saw that my xrefs and links were not working any more, at least when they referred to something in one of the other files. Of course everything worked great with RenderX's XEP but that is expensive and I needed something in a free processor like Apache's FOP.
The best I could get was this error "FO processing failed: internal-destination or external-destination must be specified in basic-link" and that was after discovering I needed olinks and needed to make a text file to describe where the links were kept (olinkdb.xml). Ugh, what a pain.
Of course I had the syntax for that olinkdb.xml file all messed up and couldn't understand the whole olink idea to begin with. Finally I got the olinkdb file right... with some tests using RenderX's XEP Personal edition. Then thanks to Google I came across this newsgroup comment from 2 weeks ago and everything started to fall into place: HERE .
So, following Robert's suggestion to turn off insert.xref.page.number I suddenly found my olinks appearing
. No page numbers or named destinations but at least there are links. RenderX works great with this insert.xref.page.number activated but FOP just choked unless it was off.
Here is a summary of what I did. Note any directory paths to be sure files are in the right place.
Sorry if some of the above texts did not come out right. I'll try to clean them up again later. As I said, ugh.
All I wanted was clickable cross links in my PDF to other sections in a PDF document. It works great when you have one single XML document and link things with xref and link but as soon as you try and get fancy and break out the chapters into their own chapter.xml files and then put them together as a book things get nightmarish.
Once I had broken everything up into their own XML files I saw that my xrefs and links were not working any more, at least when they referred to something in one of the other files. Of course everything worked great with RenderX's XEP but that is expensive and I needed something in a free processor like Apache's FOP.
The best I could get was this error "FO processing failed: internal-destination or external-destination must be specified in basic-link" and that was after discovering I needed olinks and needed to make a text file to describe where the links were kept (olinkdb.xml). Ugh, what a pain.
Of course I had the syntax for that olinkdb.xml file all messed up and couldn't understand the whole olink idea to begin with. Finally I got the olinkdb file right... with some tests using RenderX's XEP Personal edition. Then thanks to Google I came across this newsgroup comment from 2 weeks ago and everything started to fall into place: HERE .
So, following Robert's suggestion to turn off insert.xref.page.number I suddenly found my olinks appearing
. No page numbers or named destinations but at least there are links. RenderX works great with this insert.xref.page.number activated but FOP just choked unless it was off.Here is a summary of what I did. Note any directory paths to be sure files are in the right place.
make a customization xsl file with the following parameters:
< xsl :param name="fop.extensions" select="1"/>
< xsl :param name="insert.xref.page.number" select="0"/>
< xsl :param name="targets.filename" select="'C:/documents/targets.db'">
< xsl :param name="target.database.document" select="'file:/C:/documents/olinkdb.xml'">
< xsl :param name="collect.xref.targets" select="'yes'">
< xsl :param name="current.docid" select="'testbook'">
< xsl :param name="prefer.internal.olink" select="1">
< xsl :param name="insert.olink.pdf.frag" select="1">
Make an olinkdb.xml file (the targets.db will be autogenerated) like below
< ?xml version="1.0"?>
< !DOCTYPE targetset SYSTEM "file:/C:/docbook-xsl-1.69.0/common/targetdatabase.dtd" [
< !ENTITY book-targets SYSTEM "file:/C:/documents/targets.db">
]>
< targetset>
< targetsetinfo> Description of this target database document,
which is for the examples in olink doc. < /targetsetinfo>
< document targetdoc="testbook">&book-targets;< /document>
< /targetset>
Put my olinks in with only the targetptr set to the linkend name of someplace in one of the documents (without any targetdoc). These olinks could either be with preset text or empty (and becoming autofilled later.) NOTE - the auto filling seemed to have some problems if the linkends were placed on a title. All should be fine if linkends stay on sections and chapters.
compile my pdf from the main book.xml.
< xsl :param name="fop.extensions" select="1"/>
< xsl :param name="insert.xref.page.number" select="0"/>
< xsl :param name="targets.filename" select="'C:/documents/targets.db'">
< xsl :param name="target.database.document" select="'file:/C:/documents/olinkdb.xml'">
< xsl :param name="collect.xref.targets" select="'yes'">
< xsl :param name="current.docid" select="'testbook'">
< xsl :param name="prefer.internal.olink" select="1">
< xsl :param name="insert.olink.pdf.frag" select="1">
Make an olinkdb.xml file (the targets.db will be autogenerated) like below
< ?xml version="1.0"?>
< !DOCTYPE targetset SYSTEM "file:/C:/docbook-xsl-1.69.0/common/targetdatabase.dtd" [
< !ENTITY book-targets SYSTEM "file:/C:/documents/targets.db">
]>
< targetset>
< targetsetinfo> Description of this target database document,
which is for the examples in olink doc. < /targetsetinfo>
< document targetdoc="testbook">&book-targets;< /document>
< /targetset>
Put my olinks in with only the targetptr set to the linkend name of someplace in one of the documents (without any targetdoc). These olinks could either be with preset text or empty (and becoming autofilled later.) NOTE - the auto filling seemed to have some problems if the linkends were placed on a title. All should be fine if linkends stay on sections and chapters.
compile my pdf from the main book.xml.
Sorry if some of the above texts did not come out right. I'll try to clean them up again later. As I said, ugh.
Free XSL-FO transformations for docbook
28/07/05 00:57
Well, I've been working with Docbook for sometime and it's always a hassle to get things looking the way you want (for instance a PDF). There is a lot of support and documentation out there but it is still time-consuming to do what one would consider simple formatting in MS WORD.
Hopefully with the combination of RenderX's Free Personal Edition and XML Mind's FO Convertor it might be getting a bit easier.
Currently I've been using the Apache FOP FO processor and while things do get done there is a lot more formatting that I would like to see in my PDF documents. So far I have signed up and received my XEP personal key. I am hoping to give it a whirl sometime next month and put it to the test.
Hopefully with the combination of RenderX's Free Personal Edition and XML Mind's FO Convertor it might be getting a bit easier.
Currently I've been using the Apache FOP FO processor and while things do get done there is a lot more formatting that I would like to see in my PDF documents. So far I have signed up and received my XEP personal key. I am hoping to give it a whirl sometime next month and put it to the test.
