I am using pdfbox to merge and print PDFs. Either there's a lot I don't understand about creating PDFs with pdfbox or FOP does a lot more than pdfbox can do.
-----Original Message----- From: Chris Bowditch [mailto:bowditch_ch...@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, August 26, 2011 11:28 AM To: fop-dev@xmlgraphics.apache.org Subject: Re: How do you smooth fonts? On 26/08/2011 13:49, Eric Douglas wrote: Hi Eric, > An independent contractor recommended FOP so that was the project I > looked at first. > I have used FOP so I know it works, though I'm sure no one else uses > it the same way. > I just create XML with data including tags to tell it specifically > what goes where on each page. > I've had 2 problems with FOP. > 1) It takes too much memory to generate a really large PDF. I've had > to break up my data and generate multiple PDFs using the initial page > sequence tag, then I used pdfbox to piece them together. > 2) The AWT viewer was very inefficient, so I wrote my own. > > I'm not familiar with iText so I don't know if it can generate the > PDFs like FOP with the custom embedded fonts, SVG graphics, etc. > I saw some messages recently on the pdfbox list that people were > switching from iText, something about licensing issues. It could be that PDF Box is more suitable for you. iText and PDFBox are similar libraries both targetted at creating PDFs. What is clear to me is that FOP doesn't seem like a good fit for your requirements. Regards, Chris > > -----Original Message----- > From: Chris Bowditch [mailto:bowditch_ch...@hotmail.com] > Sent: Friday, August 26, 2011 5:52 AM > To: fop-dev@xmlgraphics.apache.org > Subject: Re: How do you smooth fonts? > > On 22/08/2011 21:57, Eric Douglas wrote: > > Hi Eric, > >> When I transform XSLFO with FOP I can send the output to PDF or AWT >> and text looks sharp. >> I'm trying to use the same fonts to generate graphics directly since >> I'm programmatically generating the input to my FOP process and I >> don't actually need the XSLFO process. >> > If you know the position of all your text in advance and don't need > XSL-FO, then FOP seems like the wrong tool for the job. Why not use > iText, which has an API for creating PDF? >> I know exactly what text I want to print, what size I want it, and >> exactly where I want it on the page. >> I tried putting the text on an image and putting the image on a Swing >> panel and it always comes out fuzzy. It's even fuzzier if I try to >> save that image to a file or send it to a printer. >> >> I tried using the FOP classes for loading the font, using the >> Java2DGraphicsState, FontInfo, and FontMetricsMapper objects to >> generate the text. It's always rendered blurry. What could I be > missing? > Chris > >
