Clay, It's not just the *quantity* of consumers, it is also their level of happiness, as well as our ability to recruit developers willing to do the coding. (Absent committers willing to spend the time on the code, *no* version of PDF will get supported.) Per your suggestion, though, if we were to drop the FOP's PDF specification-level to pre-2000 versions, these problems occur:
1.) The 98% that would have no problem with the 2001 spec will note that our product doesn't render as well as the commercial products do. Features they would want to implement aren't possible. So the benefit of making the 2% AR4.0 user base happy comes at a price of making unhappy the other 98%, and due the ratios involved, overall satisfaction with the FOP product would fall through the floor. 2.) It is next to impossible to recruit people to study the PDF specification inside and out in order to implement a PDF renderer--there are no shortage of other much-more-in-use skills that take far less time to learn. That problem is compounded when you ask them (1) to not only study the PDF spec, but a commercially obsolete 6-year old version of it, and (2) to spend their time doing so with the full knowledge of when they're finished, everyone is going to be panning their work (see #1 above). Few developers can afford to do what you are proposing. 3.) Generally speaking, virtually no one is stuck at AR4.0, and those who are aren't writing FO documents. You may make that calculation that it is acceptable for 500,000 users to have a substandard product just so the feelings of 10 AR4.0 users don't get hurt, but I don't think you'll get much support for that on the team. 4.) By having a substandard PDF renderer, you lose more V5/V6 people than you gain of V4 people, so overall application usage drops rather than increases. Without exception the V5/V6 people are the ones you would want to please anyway--they're the ones writing the reviews, they're the ones more likely to be using it for production applications. (Someone from IBM or Sun isn't going to write a review of "Using FOP with AR4.0"; instead they will write about "FOP with AR6.0", and in particular how poorly it performs and how out-of-date it is.) Glen (Who thinks AR V4 will work with the 1.4 spec anyway ;) --- Clay Leeds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Oct 11, 2004, at 7:06 AM, Glen Mazza wrote: > > 1.4 (Copyright 2001) is fine for us. > > That's OK by me, as long as that is the consensus > and not the opinion > of one of our esteemed committers. I was hoping for > a little discussion > about why PDF 1.3 is not even an option? There is > some discussion of > this topic in the archives[1] & [2] and also in the > FOPProjectTasks > wiki[3]. I acknowledge certain items require PDF 1.4 > (transparency, > encryption, and others[4]). But like Jeremias said > in this thread[2]: >
