FW: [iText-questions] Re: merging two libraries

[New, Cecil (GEAE)]

My suggestion was *not* to merge the two!

iText is a Java API with a document creation focus.  In this day and age,
XSL:FO can be viewed as just another document type - in the same way that
more proprietary or older formats are (that is, PDF, RTF, etc.).

Now XSL:FO is different in that you can't just double click on one and see
something.  But the FOP project comes close.

Making iText (optionally) output xsl:fo would greatly extend its potential
applications and make it squarely standards based.

I would like to think that someday, StarOffice, Wordperfect, etc. would
either natively use xsl:fo as their file storage format or at least be able
to import it.

Having something like iText that *programatically* create documents is very
exciting!

-Original Message-
From: Keiron Liddle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 3:53 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: fop-dev@xml.apache.org; itext-questions@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [iText-questions] Re: merging two libraries


Hi,

 From the archives it appears that the discussion on the fop-dev list was 
about 2 years ago (no apparent refusal though). It is certainly time to 
revisit.

 From the small amount of information I know about iText it would appear 
to be a more advanced pdf library.
I don't know what the license issues might be.

What sort of joining forces are you proposing?

Please send to the fop-dev list for further discussion.

Regards,
Keiron.


On 2002.03.12 09:27 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hello all,
 
 I'm not familiar with FOP, but I can't help noticing
 that people are moving from FOP to iText and vice versa. As original 
 developer of iText, a JAVA-PDF library, I already
 proposed you guys at Apache twice to join forces and to combine
 both libraries. I now subscribe to this mailing list only to
 ask you a third time to reconsider your refusal. Please read these mails 
 from some iText/FOP users:
 http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/8175/0/8071577/

http://www.mail-archive.com/itext-questions%40lists.sourceforge.net/msg00491

 .html Please send your answers to the iText mailing list.
 You don't need to subscribe, I will pass them through.
 Remark: sorry, but due to the lack of time to read all
 my mail as it is, I will now unsubscribe from the FOP
 mailing list. kind regards,
 Bruno Lowagie

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Re: [iText-questions] Re: merging two libraries

[Nicola Ken Barozzi]

From: New, Cecil (GEAE) [EMAIL PROTECTED]

 My suggestion was *not* to merge the two!

 iText is a Java API with a document creation focus.  In this day and age,
 XSL:FO can be viewed as just another document type - in the same way that
 more proprietary or older formats are (that is, PDF, RTF, etc.).

Sorry if it's a bit off-topic, but this issue is similar to the one we just
managed to handle between POI (http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/) and Cocoon
(http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/).

POI is a project that makes it possible to read-write common office file
formats in Java.
Cocoon is an XML processing framework-server.

The POI team donated a Cocoon component that uses POI and outputs XML, but
on the Cocoon side, committers saw too much POI code in it.

Basically we understood that a project to read-write a file format should
have a solid Java API. Other projects can use it to produce other results.
Merging is not the best solution, both for developers and users.