[FYI] Apache FOP 0.90BETA1 Trial

[Tommy Reynolds]

Hello, all!

This is a status update.  As you probably know, FDP intend to use
Apache FOP to render the PDF versions of our documents.  The 0.20.5
version is quite old; furious development is underway.

The Apache FOP team have made available a beta release of their
heavily-rewritten product.  You can find out more from their

	http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/relnotes.html

web site.  I tried it out against the CVS versions of the Fedora
Release Notes and thought you might like to see the results.  You can
find the English and Italian versions here:

	http://www.megacoder.com/nobots/RELEASE-NOTES-en.pdf
	http://www.megacoder.com/nobots/RELEASE-NOTES-it.pdf

The Japanese version built, but the wrong font was used, so everything
was a '#' character.  The Russian version aborted.

I think they look remarkably good, given that I used the original,
mostly-generic PDF stylesheets.

I haven't tried to compile this using GCJ; that's out of my range.
Perhaps one of you might make one attempt, just to see what happens.

As Karsten mentioned earlier, we should be getting some help with the
graphics rendering component -- so we can avoid the closed-source
libraries FOP uses.  However, if we stick with .JPG and .EPS input
graphics, the built-in FOP support should be quite good enough.  We
just need to get the GCJ compile going... Still, I prefer .PNG image
files and am looking forward to the "correct" solution.

Cheers