Greetings, We use the DITA Open Toolkit and FOP extensively. Whenever I review the FOP release notes, I need to translate the fix descriptions to determine the impact on our documentation renders. Sometimes the descriptions are sufficient to make this determination, but most times I'm at a loss, because they're mostly written in FOP developer-speak and I don't know anything about the internals to do the translation myself. I often take the time to look at any attached FO files to see if I can infer the use cases that would be affected by a fix. In our DITA-OT XSL transforms, we create templates to work around observed FOP problems, if possible, so it would help us identify which workarounds could be retired if we had a better idea of how a fix could impact the rendered results.
The descriptions that are particularly helpful to end-users are ones worded like "This fix addresses cases where a table cell with list items that split across pages would sometimes cause extra whitespace to occur at the top of the 2nd page." In full disclosure, my manager complains about this same issue with the release note entries our software engineers write for the same reason. To address this, we now use a special Jira field, called something like "Release Note Description" so we don't have to hack the summary field in case its wording is better for developers and communicates what needs to fixed where. We're always happy to see ongoing FOP releases, so thanks to everyone who contributed to 2.8. Best Regards, John Kirkilis Nokia Cloud and Network Services
