Thank you to all who have replied. The answer by Andreas Delmelle was right on! I switched over to using external-graphic and not only can I render within my 1 GB memory limit, my PDF files seem to display faster.
Today I was thinking that if this worked, it would be neat to be able to use the same technique to embed PDF data; effectively creating content which can be efficiently repeated throughout the document. That is when I came home to find Peter Coppens's email regarding his extension to do just that: http://www.jeremias-maerki.ch/development/fop/ You seem to be on the right track my friend. And finally to Mr. Pietschmann's statement: > In any case, I'm always amazed by the applications people find > for XSLFO in general and FOP in particular. Oh yeah! This is a fantastic tool and anyone with a little programming experience and a little imagination can really go to town. I once had to generate API documentation for a large system of code (many languages) that was documented by several developers (it took 5.5 man-years to document). I took their documentation, plus some software analysis tools, graphviz, and FOP and ended up with over 5,000 pages of documentation (which the customer required to be printed). I love the fact that I can take a Java object modal, and use JAX-B to serialize it to XML, which is then forwarded to an XSLT transformer which converts it into XSLFO, which is rendered to PDF by FOP. And all of this is done entirely in SAX!!! Using the Collection and Iterator interfaces, one can load large datasets into JAX-B lazily. So, at no point in time is the entire dataset (in any format) ever in memory. And all in only in a dozen lines of code!!! Adding in the Ancient Egyptian is a synch with the JSesh library that converts MDC (a standard transcription system for AE hieroglyphs) to SVG. The only difficult part was taking the source of the dictionary which laid out the hieroglyphs using absolute coordinates and converting that to MDC (which doesn't use coordinates at all, but rather logical associations between glyphs; such as A is on top of B, etc.). This required the development of a layout analysis engine, which will need some more tweaking apparently. Anyway, when I put the dictionary online I hope to document the whole process (including code) when I get done with this (this is all open-source/free-to-abuse stuff). I think there are some really good FOP tutorials in this. Ted --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
