Jeremias Maerki wrote: Hi Jeremias,
sorry for the slow reply.
Yesterday, we've discussed a possible incubation of PDFBox at the ASF. There are several projects that are interested in such a move. For us here in the XML Graphics project, PDFBox is interesting due to its parsing functionality. Our own PDF library doesn't have that functionality and is instead optimized for writing PDF which PDFBox isn't.
I agree PDFBox would be a useful complimentary library to our own.
As you may know, I've implemented a FOP plug-in that allows embedding of PDF in newly generated PDF documents through XSL-FO. Using the same PDF library for both tasks would be beneficial in the long-term.
Yes agreed.
Please take a look at the incubation proposal (link below) we're currently writing. I have some questions to the XML Graphics community in this context: - Should the XML Graphics PMC be the sponsoring entity? [1]
Yes, but I don't have any time to support such a process.
- Can anyone besides me imagine investing time/resources to help with the incubation, teaching PDFBox additional tricks like we need them?
Sorry I just don't have enough time to help.
- Can we imagine PDFBox becoming a subproject of XML Graphics after successful incubation? PDF is not really an XML technology but deals with graphical output. Newer technologies like XPS (Microsoft's XML paper specification) and Adobe's Mars are XML-based paged document formats. Not that they play a big role in the market, yet.
I am starting to hear clients talking about XPS.
[1] Makes sense if we have a strong interest in PDFBox. If it's just me, then it doesn't make sense and we're going to find a different solution. Please note: We have some functionality overlap between our PDF library and PDFBox in any case. Examples: - Writing PDF (org.apache.fop.pdf)
Since our library is optimized for this, we probably should just leave the writing to FOP's PDF Library.
- Parsing fonts (org.apache.fop.fonts, org.apache.batik.svggen.font.table) - Font conversion (org.apache.batik.svggen.font) - XMP metadata (org.apache.xmlgraphics.xmp) - Image loading (org.apache.fop.image, org.apache.batik.ext.awt.image.spi) BTW, the above table shows some spots where we could actually discuss better cooperation within XML Graphics, i.e. between Batik & FOP.
Merging the other packages will be more of a challenge to ensure the end result has the best that all projects have to offer.
Thoughts?
I vote +1 in favour but as already mentioned I can't help in this process. Chris <snip/> --------------------------------------------------------------------- Apache XML Graphics Project URL: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/ To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
