Re: Form Extension

[Florian Hecht]

I went to that page, but the PDF link doesn't work.

The link is fixed. It should work now (http://wwwstud.ira.uka.de/~s_hecht/)
Before you post on fop-user perhaps you/we should transfer it to a more 
'permanent' server (since your e-mail will be in the FOP archives in 
perpetuity). I'm thinking that a good to place for this extension is on 
the 'Objects For Formatting Objects' Sourceforge project page[2] 
(assuming that Simon Pepping and/or other FOP committers agree). 
However, before we do that, we need to ensure it has the proper 
licensing. Please go to Apache Software Grants page for information on 
how to transfer[3].
   

I think it is a good project to be hosted by the OFFO project. The
purpose of the OFFO project is to keep FO-related OS projects
available for users and prospective developers.
In view of the fact that you do not wish to develop it further, it
should work out of the box for fop-0.20.5. Are you willing to answer
questions from users?
 

Sounds good to me to put it into the OFFO Project. As it is my 'baby' 
I'm of course willing to answer any questions about it.

It would be good if you have some developer documentation, to give a
prospective maintainer a headstart. 
 

The paper is nearly completed. It contains some indepth description of 
the implementation, but it will be only available in German. I think I 
will translate this section to English and some starting information. So 
that someone who want's to tinker with it knows where to start.

It would be best if you release it under the Apache2 License. However,
OFFO is able to host projects under any OSI approved Open Source
license. You need to send the grant to me as the project maintainer; I
will deposit it with the OFFO project.
 

I'm rather busy this week, so you'll have to give me a week or so to 
review the licence and grant stuff. This would be my first open source 
contribution, so I want to do things right.

Note that I am not offering to do maintenance or to learn enough about
the project to answer user questions. Currently OFFO does not have CVS
services, but they can be set up if there is an interest.
 

You can direct people to me for questions. No Problem.
From Clay Leeds:
Also, as you are probably aware, fop-0.20.5 (the fop-0_20_2-maintain 
branch) is a dead-end (it's in code freeze so FOP development can 
focus all energies on the FOP 1.0 release). It would be *HUGE* (!) if 
you could 'port' your work over to the 1.0-dev (HEAD branch). Since 
you are intimately aware with the inner workings of your code, no one 
will be able to do this more efficiently or effectively.
I've taken a quick look at the HEAD branch: Adding the new fo-elements 
and the necessary PDF objects and PDFRenderer functions should be 
straight forward. But I had to make some ugly hacks, in order to 
actually make this work with FOP. I definitely think it's possible to 
integrate it into HEAD, but it would require work on my side. At the 
moment I'm relatively busy with my studies. But when I find some time, I 
might take it up again. It's good to here that there is interest in the 
ability to generade PDFs with forms, but I can't promise anything. Sorry.

Web Maestro Clay 

Regards, Simon
 

Big thanks for the feedback. It's nice to see that others are interested 
in one's work.

Cheers,
Florian