Hi Scott,
On Wednesday 09 October 2002 17:15, Sauyet, Scott (OTS-HAR) wrote:
. . .
So is integrating other renderers something that the group
would eventually like to do?
. . .
Yes, we've been talking about structure-based renderers (like RTF and MIF)
vs. layout-based ones (PDF being the focal point) for some time.
The following messages might shed some light on this:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fop-devm=102742684000426w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fop-devm=102795797014083w=2
. . .
As of today, I know nothing about PDF syntax and little about RTF. I
figure I'm going to have to learn both. I understand FO fairly well, and I
speak Java fairly fluently. What do you think is first priority?
. . .
As Jeremias said, you're the one who decides what you'd like to work on.
I'm personally biased towards the RTF renderer because that's the part I know
best, so here are some starting points if you're interested in studying this
in more detail and hopefully jumping in.
You won't need much RTF knowledge to start with as the jfor RTF library will
generate it for you, and no PDF knowledge at all since this RTF renderer will
bypass the layout and PDF generation stages completely.
Starting points:
1) org/apache/fop/apps/StructureHandler is the base class that receives
structure events from the FO tree while the input XSL-FO is being parsed.
The main class of the RTF renderer will inherit from this class to transform
the events into an RTF document.
2) Package org/apache/fop/mif is an example of how to build a
structure-based renderer similar to what the RTF renderer
(org/apache/fop/rtf) will be.
3) jfor (www.jfor.org) is currently a separate project that converts XSL-FO
to RTF directly, but could take advantage of FOP's much better handling of
XSL-FO properties, hence the plan of replacing jfor by a FOP RTF renderer.
4) My suggestion is to first use the RTF library from jfor in binary form, by
including jfor's jar in the FOP distribution, to create the RTF document from
the StructureHandler events. The current jfor code does a similar thing where
the jfor Converter (jfor/jfor/converter/Converter) uses SAX events to drive
the jfor RTF library.
Later, when FOP becomes better than jfor at generating RTF, we can move the
jfor RTF library code into the FOP codebase. I'd like this to happen in
a second stage to avoid having to maintain two RTF libraries while both
projects coexist.
Hope this helps - feel free to ask any additional questions!
-Bertrand
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