Joe DeVivo wrote: > 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
Good choice. I think FOP is one of the coolest projects imaginable. > 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. As you have already discovered, layout is where we need the most help. It is also the most complex, and I don't know that any of our active developers understands the new layout strategy, which is called layoutmgr (Joerg is the possible exception). Whether that is a "good place to start" would be debatable. Probably a good guide is 1) what interests you, and 2) what you have the capacity to do. Check out: http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?FOPProjectTasks which is reachable from the Development tab on the web site (Design: Unresolved), for a list of ideas. We don't really keep this stuff up-to-date, and there really is a minimum of coordination. Be sure to read: http://xml.apache.org/fop/dev/index.html and to participate in the fop-dev mailing list (this list). You will get *lots* of ideas of projects just listening and helping there. > 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 :) I know we have 1.0 all over the place, but IMO we have 0.26 that needs to be done first, and probably quite a few more releases before 1.0. It is almost 100% certain that any issues you have with 1.0 are not with anything specific on your machine. It is pre-pre-alpha, more of an idea in progress than a product. Since it is in a state of general "doesn't work", I don't think there is any place where specifics are listed -- it would be too long a list. > 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. The social aspects are the most challenging for me. If I have x hours this week to code on FOP, I will probably spend 2x discussing, debating, documenting. Reaching consensus on important issues is more difficult and time-consuming than you might think necessary. This is mostly because the relationships are peer-to-peer. If you can be patient with that model, it has some wonderful advantages as well. Welcome aboard. Please let us know if we can help. Victor Mote