On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 11:41 -0500, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> Uttered "Paul W. Frields" <stickster(a)gmail.com>, spake thus:
>
> > There was some list traffic about this several times in the not-too-
> > distant past... I can't remember the content of all the discussions, but
> > the idea of whether to use FOP was definitely tossed around. Could
> > anyone with some time and inclination check the archives and try to
> > summarize the discussions here? Or is that unnecessary? If someone
> > were to do that, I would put a page up on the wiki in an agreeable place
> > (and with an agreeable name) just so we have a reference point.
>
> The concern was that FOP needed some non-GPL assistance to render
> some graphic content. Specifically, FOP can render BMP, EPS, GIF,
> JPEG and TIFF files without any assistance. With JIMI or JAI (which
> are not GPL'ed), PNG can be rendered. With BATIK, also an Apache
> product, SVG files can also be rendered.
>
> None of the non-free assistant packages are included or distributed
> with FOP. FOP will notice these add-ons if present, but will work
> without them, with the only caveat being PNG input will not work.
>
> The official details are at
http://xml.apache.org/fop/graphics.html,
> for those who are interested.
CC-ing to fedora-devel-java-list
Surely there must be a GPL-friendly PNG handler in Java somewhere? How
hard would it be to rewrite this part of FOP? What's the status of
getting a natively-compiled FOP into Fedora?
There's a gdk-pixbuf-based PNG decoder in libgcj's javax.imageio
implementation. No encoder though. Probably the most efficient way to
get a GPL-compatible Java PNG encoder is to package JMagick:
Likely some glue code will be required to make it work with FOP. Have
you asked the FOP maintainers why a JMagick back end doesn't exist yet?
Tom