FYI, we have a need for some help in compiling FOP with gcj. This is a prerequisite to getting FOP support in xmlto. For details from Tommy, see below.

thx - Karsten

-------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Tommy Reynolds Tommy.Reynolds@MegaCoder.com Reply-To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com To: fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Subject: Re: [fedora-java] FOP, gcj, classpath, oh my! Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:16:47 -0700

Uttered Karsten Wade kwade@redhat.com, spake thus:

Tommy - is the barrier to having make run the Java tools the lack of support in xmlto? If we're this close, maybe we can get xmlto updated in the devel tree (rawhide) right away. Bonus would be if we could see all of this pushed eventually into updates to FCs 5 and 6.

Karsten,

I've had XMLTO working with FOP, and producing PDF's, for quite a while now. As Paul W Frields as pointed out, the PDF's look awful because we need work on the stylesheet.

As you probably remember, I sent the appropriate XMLTO patches for FOP to Tim Waugh many, many moons ago. AIUI, his reluctance to add them officially has been mostly that FOP wasn't free. The FOP dependancy in the XMLTO RPM would be endlessly confusing.

If needed I could mangle the patches to use either FOP or passivetex so as not to break things while our FOP implementation matures, with the default renderer being passivetex. These are just minor details.

I lack the java-fu to compile FOP using gcj; if someone could do it for me, and maybe send me the patches, I could provide Tim a with a complete package.

In summary:

1) If we could get someone to provide patches to compile FOP using gcj, I could do the RPM-fu.

2) Having hopes of a FOP rpm, I can update the XMLTO rpm to utilize it.

3) Present Tim Waugh with a fait acompli.

I'm not sure that #3 is sufficient to get the updates into rawhide, but it's a necessary step.

Cheers