Installation Troubles?

[Shawn Hempel <he...@zOregonTech.com>]

Hello. I'm a student curious about various XML parsers/translaters/etc.
Anyway, I'm trying desperately to try out FOP.

My single goal for the last day and a half has been to convert some
simple XML + XSL files into a PDF. I'm running Windows 98 and I cannot
even get this simple conversion to work - my time is limited so I'm
about to give up. I have *no* experience with Java, so all of this
class-based execution is pretty foreign to me (I'm a C++ guy).

I downloaded the Fop-0.18.1-DEV-src.zip distribution files and
uncompressed them, but now I'm stuck.

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I have tried a lot of things, primarily around the following steps:
1) Created my XML and XSL files (planets.xml & planets.xsl) and checked
for well-formedness
2) Copied them into my Fop-0.18.1 directory
3) Executed fop.bat on the command-line using:
Fop -xml planets.xml -xsl planets.xsl -pdf planets.pdf

And the resulting output is:
C:\Program Files\xml\Fop-0.18.1>java -cp
fop.jar;lib\w3c.jar;lib\xalan-2.0.0.jar;lib\xerces-1.2.3.jar;lib\jimi-1.0.jar
org.apache.fop.apps.Fop -xml planets.xml -xsl planets.xsl -pdf
planets.pdf

ERROR: Don't know what to do with

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I have tried many different variations on that, all with similar
results.

However, if I run it without an output parameter it seems to get a
little further:
Fop -xml planets.xml -xsl planets.xsl

The resulting output is:
C:\Program Files\xml\Fop-0.18.1>java -cp
fop.jar;lib\w3c.jar;lib\xalan-2.0.0.jar;lib\xerces-1.2.3.jar;lib\jimi-1.0.jar
org.apache.fop.apps.Fop -xml planets.xml -xsl planets.xsl

FOP 0.18.1-DEV
using SAX parser org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser
building formatting object tree
WARNING: A 'flow-name' is required for fo:flow. This constraint will be
enforced in future versions of FOP
setting up fonts
formatting FOs into areas
 [1]
FATAL ERROR:
 (The specified path is invalid)

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Thanks in advance for your help. I'm sorry if my question is very basic
- like I said, I don't have a lot of time to commit to this.

Shawn Hempel
hempels@zOregonTech.com