Feature List

[Stephane Bline <st...@peregrine.com>]

Hi all,

Following Arved's post on this list, here is a categorized feature list for
fop.

Use case : Production environment. All our documentation is written in
DocBook compliant XML, translated in 7 languages (ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2,
Shift-Jis & Unicode are mandatory), then processed through XSL stylesheets
to output content to several formats, including (but not limited to) html,
javahelp, chm, rtf, text, pdf. Fop comes into play at the end of the
process, to format the resulting formatting objects. The aim is to have
print perfect documents.
Volume averages 450 documents per month.
Fop currently lacks a handful of features we need. We have to circumvent
those by tweaking things manually. And this is precisely what we don't want
to do.

Must-have (Prefix number is the priority level):

1- Layout/pagination properties like "odd-or-even" or "force-page-count".
This is instrumental for the typical odd-even layout of most printed
technical documents.
1- Keeps & Breaks properties implemented (all of them) to allow for proper
handling of widows & orphans.
1- Inline graphics rendered properly and not resulting in a block change in
the formatting area.
1- Proper formatting of tables (column & row spanning, tables spanning over
several pages break the background cell color in some cases)
2- "linefeed-treatment" property
2- Improve overall speed/memory usage of FOP
2- Font support in pdf bookmarks (displays only garbage for Japanese for
example)
2- Block handling in Japanese (not sure about that one but when I test a
Japanese document, the contents of a block never wraps, it just overflows on
the right of the pdf)

Important (Prefix number is the priority level):
1- "format" property,
1- "table-caption" formatting object,
2- "content-width" & "content-height" properties (very useful for scaling)
2- Better error messages (right now if fop displays an error/warning there
is no way to easily identify the source of the error, like the line number
in the fo file)
3- Streaming pdfs

Nice to have (unsorted):

- "external-destination" for links,
- complete "leader" fo handling,
- security options for pdfs,
- a way to populate the authoring informations in the pdfs,
- a way to specify the opening properties of the generated pdf.

This is all I could think of at the moment. Regards to all,

Stephane Bline.

-----Original Message-----
From: Arved Sandstrom [mailto:Arved_37@chebucto.ns.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 5:19 AM
To: fop-dev@xml.apache.org
Subject: Use Cases & Feature Requests


Hi, folks

In one form or another we get feature requests now - people ask why feature 
X is not implemented, or when it will be implemented, or whether it's 
implemented, and we can logically surmise that this is a desired feature.
:-)

But this all arrives in a fairly haphazard and disjointed fashion. It's hard

for us to piece together a picture of what are the most important features. 
All of you who are programmers know that just a list of rquirements is not 
enough - you also want to have priorities: is this a "1"? Is that a "3"? Is 
this "must-have" or is it "optional"?

So, what I'd like to request is this. If you can or want, please provide a 
prioritized list of features that you consider important. These can be 
features that are already in place, or unimplemented ones. Bear in mind that

because of refactoring, implemented features could get bashed around a bit 
(which you have already seen), so if it is important to you that feature 
such-and-such doesn't get this kind of treatment, or is broken for as short 
a period of time as possible, include that feature in your list.

The ranking scale isn't overly important - use a scale of 1-5, with 1 being 
the most important, if you like, or rate your features as "must have", 
"important", "nice to have", or anything that makes sense to all of us.
Please label the post as being a FEATURE LIST or something similar.

If you can provide use-cases at the same time, "e.g. we are doing business 
forms, and use the following features, with these categories of 
importance...", that would be even better.

There is no urgency. Obviously the more of these we have the better it will 
be for all concerned, I believe. It's easier for us to look at a bug with a 
user-specified severity and urgency in the defect tracking, and assess it, 
if we have a bigger picture and more context for FOP usage and wish-lists.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,
Arved Sandstrom

Fairly Senior Software Type
e-plicity (http://www.e-plicity.com)
Wireless * B2B * J2EE * XML --- Halifax, Nova Scotia


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Re: Feature List

[Kelly Campbell <ca...@merlot.channelpoint.com>]

Some comments below.

On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 08:22:00AM +0200, Stephane Bline wrote:
> 2- Font support in pdf bookmarks (displays only garbage for Japanese for
> example)
> 2- Block handling in Japanese (not sure about that one but when I test a
> Japanese document, the contents of a block never wraps, it just overflows on
> the right of the pdf)

Do you have some fo examples which use Japanese that we can test with?

> 3- Streaming pdfs

By this do you mean pdfs which have the first page ready to render
immediately while it's downloading the rest of the document? PDF's don't
really stream, but they added a small xref table somewhere near the
beginning to be able to bring up page 1. You still have to wait until the
final xref table at the end of the document is received before you can
really use the document.

> 
> Nice to have (unsorted):
> 
> - "external-destination" for links,

This is already implemented and works for linking to URL's
and other PDF documents. We don't support named destinations in PDF
documents yet though. See the link.fo and newlinktest.fo (just added
tonight) in the examples directory. Is there something about
external-destinations I'm missing here that you want?

Thanks for the feedback.

-Kelly
-- 
Kelly A. Campbell              Software Engineer
<ca...@merlotxml.org>           ChannelPoint, Inc.
<ca...@channelpoint.com>        Colorado Springs, Co.

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Re: Feature List

["Peter S. Housel" <ho...@acm.org>]

> 2- Block handling in Japanese (not sure about that one but when I test a
> Japanese document, the contents of a block never wraps, it just overflows
on
> the right of the pdf)

http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr14/ is a good reference for
implementing this sort of thing.

Cheers,
-Peter S. Housel-   housel@acm.org   http://members.home.com/housel/



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