Besides the important changes listed below, the most important areas with improvements in this release are:
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:
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.
Besides the important changes listed below, the most important areas with improvements in this release are:
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:
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.
This is the first production grade release of the new FOP codebase.
Caveats:
"svn log --verbose http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/xmlgraphics/fop/trunk/"
.