Dear developers, dear members of the Project Management,
we work on a research project called "XML-Print" at the University of Trier, Germany. The idea is to implement (or improve) a XML to PDF typesetter with an easy-to-use GUI which helps humanists to publish their critical editions, dictionaries etc. It will be part of the toolkit "TextGrid Lab" which is a long-term project to develop a general framework containing different tools for collaborative work on digital documents (http://www.textgrid.de/en/startseite.html). Having looked at existing approaches FOP seems to be a stable and promising base to build on. However there are some features missing either not yet implemented in FOP itself or even not defined in XSL-FO 1.1. We therefore would have to implement features based on XSL-FO 1.1, but also on the requirements for XSL-FO 2.0 as described in http://www.w3.org/TR/xslfo20-req/. Among others we are especially interested in some elements mentioned in the current design draft like - marginalia (2.2.3) - side-by-side flows (2.2.6) - line numbering (2.2.7.1) ** - cross references (2.2.8) ** The line numbering will also involve some more complex issues, not only a simple line numbering of every n-th line. For example there could be interactions between line numbers and marginalia, which have to be considered in the typesetting process. We would also have to design and implement new layout features currently not mentioned in any seen XSL-FO design draft like the usage of a complex bibliographic apparatus or a grid typesetting feature. There are also requirements for complex footnotes, which may lead to an extension of the currently available footnote mechanism in the XSL-FO standard. At the current point in our work we wonder how we can use the current status of FOP, how we can embed our work into future releases and last but not least, give some work back to the community. One developer would work full-time on FOP for at least one year. Furthermore we would like to know if an early implementation of requirements -- using a separate namespace of course -- is somehow wanted and if there is any other group working on them. What would be the next steps for us? Thank you for any responses. Best regards and Happy Holidays from Martin Sievers and Roland Schwarz
