The initial code for the Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) was contributed to the Apache Software Foundation by James Tauber in 1999.

The project evolved with the W3C specification and was quickly adopted by many. In July of 2003, the most famous version of FOP, 0.20.5, was released. It is now used to produce documents all over the globe.

Even before release 0.20.5 a redesign effort commenced to address short-comings that prevented important features from being implemented using the current design.

In October 2004, Batik and FOP joined forces and together formed the XML Graphics project. This change was made to scale down the old Apache XML project, to improve project oversight, and to allow for better collaboration because Batik and FOP share many similarities.

In 2005, the redesign finally took a leap forward, which resulted in the first release from the new codebase (FOP 0.90alpha). The project team has published a number of releases since then. FOP made big steps forward.

The next version, to be released in March 2008, will be 0.95. Although FOP still carries pre 1.0 version numbers it is production-ready. Some features are still missing before version 1.0 can be released.