Hi, I want to take this occasion to look back at the large role Jeremias played in XML graphics and FOP over the last few years.
When Jeremias started to work full-time on FOP (Jan. 2005), the project had not seen a release for a couple of years. The old release, 0.20.5, was still the stable release used by thousands of users. We had received the Knuth algorithm for FOP from Luca Furini, but a number of important features were still lacking. Jeremias' first task was the implementation of tables. Next he implemented a few other important features that were still lacking, and made the new FOP code ready for its first release. This release was numbered version 0.90alpha1 (23 November 2005), and was followed by more or less regular releases up to the current version 0.95. Jeremias contributed many other features. First of all a test framework based on the intermediate area tree (XML renderer). Together with Luca he implemented the Knuth algorithm for page breaking. He added PDF/A-1b support, complete with XMP handling (in XML Graphics Commons). He developed the FOP factory, which improves reuse of configuration data on subsequent FOP runs in the same application. He added an event notification mechanism, which decouples event notifications for users from logging for developers. He added another intermediate area tree mechanism (MIME_FOP_IF), which adds speed gains and a new interface for rendering. He added many improvements in image handling, a.o. a new image loading framework. Much of this work could be done because Jeremias tirelessly worked to interest a number of corporate users of FOP in contributing to the project. Jeremias also initiated and advocated the creation of the XML Graphics project as a top level project in the ASF, comprising FOP and Batik (Oct. 2004). Since the creation he has been its champion and the chair of its PMC. He was elected a Member of the ASF in December 2004. Jeremias is a creative and passionate developer, with a great knowledge and understanding of page description languages like PDF and PostScript, of printing, computer graphics and image formats. Passions have their ups and downs. In a serious downturn Jeremias decided to step down as PMC chairman, and more importantly, take a time-out from FOP development. This is a great loss for the project, and I hope he soon regains his pleasure in XML graphics and FOP development. I thank Jeremias deeply for all his contributions. Simon Pepping home page: http://www.leverkruid.eu --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@xmlgraphics.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@xmlgraphics.apache.org