Getting started

[Joe DeVivo]

Hello,

I just stumbled on to Fop earlier this week and it looks like something 
I can really get into working on. I've been looking at the source and 
getting my feet wet, like with the patch I just submitted for the Ant 
Task. I also have an idea on max-height and max-width for 
external-graphic. Once I learn my way around the source I'd like to 
take on bigger tasks. Any suggestions for a good place to start? I'm a 
programmer by trade, working mostly in J2EE over the last 4 years. 
Plenty of XML and HTML experience to boot, but not a lot when it comes 
to PDFs and rendering, and I'm picking up XSL and XSL-FO pretty 
quickly.

Also, I'm curious as to the state of the 1.0 release. I've rendered 
some pdfs that definitely have issues, but I don't really know if there 
issues are specific to my machine, or the fact that 1.0 isn't ready for 
prime-time. For example, I'm the first page of my PDF is never actually 
the first page, and I find it in various different places depending on 
the document. These worked fine under 0.20.5. Is there any place that 
issues like these are listed? I have never worked on an open source 
project before, so don't assume I know anything about how this actually 
works :)

Any advice you can give on working on this project or open source in 
general would be appreciated. Thanks and I look forward to helping out.

--joe