Formatting Objects Processor (FOP, also known as Apache FOP) is a

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application that converts

XSL Formatting Objects XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is a markup language for XML document formatting that is most often used to generate PDF files. XSL-FO is part of Extensible Stylesheet Language, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), a set of W3C technologies desig ...

(XSL-FO) files to

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

or other printable formats. FOP was originally developed by

James Tauber James may refer to: People * James (given name) * James (surname) * James (musician), aka Faruq Mahfuz Anam James, (born 1964), Bollywood musician * James, brother of Jesus * King James (disambiguation), various kings named James * Prince James ...

who donated it to the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

in 1999. It is part of the Apache XML Graphics project. FOP is

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

, and is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

Current status

The latest version of Apache FOP is 2.11.

Major limitations

Most important elements added in XSL-FO 1.1 (flow maps, table markers, indexes. etc.) are not available In addition, older XSL-FO 1.0 features are still not fully supported including automatic table layout, floats and more.

Input support

Apache FOP supports embedding a number of image formats in the XSL-FO (through the element). These include: * SVG * PNG * Bitmap BMP *

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

(as EPS) *

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

* Some

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

formats. Apache FOP implements the element with some limitations. In versions prior to 2.0, external graphics objects were limited to being drawn inline or in a block with no wrapped text.

Output formats

Apache FOP supports the following output formats: *

(best output support), including PDF/X and

PDF/A PDF/A is an International Organization for Standardization, ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for use in the archive, archiving and long-term digital preservation, preservation of electronic documents. PDF ...

with some limitations *

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

text file facsimile *

* Direct printer output ( PCL) * AFP * RTF * Java2D/ AWT for display, printing, and page rendering to PNG and

In progress: * MIF * SVG

External links

Apache FOP Project

XSL-FO formatter comparison

References