[afp-renderer-developers] RE: FOP AFP Renderer

[Joe S. <jo...@ex...>]

On Tue, 2006-01-03 at 20:09 +0800, Manuel Mall wrote:
> just an update on the situation.
> 
> 1. Unfortunately neither yours nor Joe's CLA have been registered yet. I
> assume they are stuck in some christmas mail blockage somewhere. Would it be
> too much to ask if you could fax the CLAs to the fax number provided on the
> form (I think its +1-410-803-2258)?

My CLA was sent about a fortnight after Pete's, which is a long way from
prompt on my part, but I would have normally expected that it would have
arrived by now. Anyhoo, I'll hunt around for a fax machine tomorrow to
make sure it another copy gets through.

> 2. Since I checked the code into CVS I have done more work on it and its
> looking pretty good now in terms of feature support. This includes all the
> reference orientation stuff, image support, leaders, border styles (not
> perfect but ok). Even reinstated the first of the extensions (overlay's).

Fantastic! I would be interested to see your changes checked into
version control. I set up a workspace with the FOP_ALPHA branch of the
AFP Renderer, along with the trunk from FOP. I found that the renderer
branch no longer compiled against FOP trunk. I started fixing some of
the immediate compile errors, but ran out of time in the end (blame
Christmas, New Year, and various children's birthday parties). I realise
that it probably would have worked against the fop-0_90 branch, but I
was interested to see how stable the fop trunk was (there are still
renderer API changes, as it turned out).

> 3. Had very good results with using the FOP "built-in" font metrics for the
> standard PDF serif, sans-serif and monospace fonts and mapping those to the
> appropriate IBM font file names (both the raster and outline versions). The
> AFP Viewer is perfectly happy with that and renders those documents very
> accurately. This means the AFP renderer works "out-of-the-box" without
> having to install IBM fonts on the platform used to generate the AFP file.

That's probably a fairly elegant approach, in the end. I'm still fairly
unhappy with the font mapping configuration that is required for the AFP
Renderer, as it is. Anything that improves the "out-of-the-box"
experience can probably very measurably affect the usability of the
renderer.

Possibly another strategy we could take would be to pre-process the
metrics for a number of the most popular commercial fonts, and check the
results into version control. This could conceivably mean that no font
configuration would be needed at all, at least for the fonts we include.

> Cheers and Happy New Year

Ditto. Thanks for all the hard work!
-- 
Joe Schmetzer .:. Renaissance Developer .:. http://www.exubero.com/