Hi, I'm new to FOP and followed the discussions on this list for the last few days since I'm currently trying to use XSL:FO to produce the PDF documentation for a project database which is in XML format.
While I'm very satisfied with the resulting output, I have strong doubts about the usability of FOP in our environent due to its huge memory requirements. Although I currently only included about 50% of the contents of the database, FOP requires around 250MB of memory for the 110-page output PDF, so I would estimate the memory requirements for the total contents to ~512MB and since this is not a server-based environment, this memory would have to be available on every box. From what I've read on the list, I'm sure this is due to excessive usage of forward references and large (partly nested) tables spanning multiple pages. However, this is an absolute requirement for our documentation. So, I have two questions/suggestions: 1) Wouldn't it be possible to let FOP create the output in two steps like for instance (La)TeX does. Doing a dry run first only to calculate the page references, store them somewhere, and then produce the actual output in a second run. 2) Are there plans to port FOP to C/C++ sometime? I guess that at least part of the memory consumption is to be blamed on Java and IIRC the underlying Xerces and Xalan are already available as C++ versions, so why not FOP? Regards, Bernd
