Release Notes for Apache FOP 0.
95beta
Table of contents
1 Major Changes in Version 0.95beta.....................................................................................................2
1.1 Changes to the Bundled Extensions................................................................................................ 2
1.2 Changes to the Image Support.........................................................................................................3
1.3 Changes to the Layout Engine.........................................................................................................3
1.4 Changes to Renderers (Output Formats)......................................................................................... 3
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Release Notes for Apache FOP 0.95beta
1. Notes
Besides the important changes listed below, the most important areas with improvements in this release
are:
• Many bugfixes in tables, plus some new features (full support for keeps and breaks, border
conditionality, background on columns and header/footer/body)
• Improvements and bugfixes for font handling and font auto-detection/-registration.
• Performance improvements and memory optimizations for the property handling in the FO tree.
Please note that with this release, we've dropped support for Java 1.3. FOP will, from now on, require
at least Java 1.4.
There have been a few changes in tables that make FOP both more strict and more compliant to the
Recommendation:
• XSL-FO 1.1 explicitly states that a row-spanning fo:table-cell element is not allowed to span further
than its enclosing fo:table-header/footer/body element (see bottom of section 6.7.3). From now on
FOP will give a validation error if a document contains such an erroneous cell.
• If an fo:table element contains explicit fo:table-column children, then those elements set the total
number of columns in the table. This means that a validation error will now occur if a row contains
more cells than available columns. This change allows to improve performance, since the rendering
of the table may start as soon as the table-column elements have been parsed.
If more flexibility is needed, then the fo:table-column elements may be just omitted. The final
number of columns will then be set by the row that has the most cells.
The image libraries Jimi and JAI are no longer needed (and used) for image loading. Instead we rely
completely on the Image I/O API that has been introduced with Java 1.4. If you still need support for
bitmap image formats that do not work out-of-the-box, we recommend adding JAI Image I/O Tools (an
Image I/O compatible image codec package) to the classpath. JAI is still required for building the FOP
distribution but it is optional for normal builds and at run-time.
1. Major Changes in Version 0.95beta
Note:
This is not a complete list of changes, just some of the more important ones. A full list of changes in this release is available.
1.1. Changes to the Bundled Extensions
• Added new extension element: fox:external-document. It allows to add whole documents such as
multi-page TIFF images to be inserted as peers to a page-sequence. Each image will make up an
entire page. See the documentation for details. Committed by JM.
2
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Release Notes for Apache FOP 0.95beta
1.2. Changes to the Image Support
• A new image loading framework has been introduced to fix various problems with external graphics
and improve performance. Committed by JM.
1.3. Changes to the Layout Engine
• Added support for background on fo:table-column and fo:table-header/footer/body elements.
Committed by VH.
• Added support for conditional borders in tables, for both the separate and the collapsing border
model. Committed by VH. See Issue 43934.
• Added support for scale-down-to-fit and scale-up-to-fit (introduced in XSL 1.1). Committed by JM.
1.4. Changes to Renderers (Output Formats)
• PDF Transcoder (SVG) text painting has been completely rewritten. Except for some special cases
(with filters for example), all text (including flow text) is now painted using PDF text operators.
Committed by JM.
3
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