[fedora-java] Re: PDF generation problem solved for me

Thomas Fitzsimmons fitzsim at redhat.com
Thu Apr 7 20:27:55 UTC 2005


On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 15:49 -0400, David Malcolm wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 11:41 -0500, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> > Uttered "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com>, spake thus:
> > 
> > > There was some list traffic about this several times in the not-too-
> > > distant past... I can't remember the content of all the discussions, but
> > > the idea of whether to use FOP was definitely tossed around.  Could
> > > anyone with some time and inclination check the archives and try to
> > > summarize the discussions here?  Or is that unnecessary?  If someone
> > > were to do that, I would put a page up on the wiki in an agreeable place
> > > (and with an agreeable name) just so we have a reference point.
> > 
> > The concern was that FOP needed some non-GPL assistance to render
> > some graphic content. Specifically, FOP can render BMP, EPS, GIF,
> > JPEG and TIFF files without any assistance.  With JIMI or JAI (which
> > are not GPL'ed), PNG can be rendered.  With BATIK, also an Apache
> > product, SVG files can also be rendered.
> > 
> > None of the non-free assistant packages are included or distributed
> > with FOP.  FOP will notice these add-ons if present, but will work
> > without them, with the only caveat being PNG input will not work.
> > 
> > The official details are at http://xml.apache.org/fop/graphics.html,
> > for those who are interested.
> 
> CC-ing to fedora-devel-java-list
> 
> Surely there must be a GPL-friendly PNG handler in Java somewhere?  How
> hard would it be to rewrite this part of FOP?  What's the status of
> getting a natively-compiled FOP into Fedora?
> 

There's a gdk-pixbuf-based PNG decoder in libgcj's javax.imageio
implementation.  No encoder though.  Probably the most efficient way to
get a GPL-compatible Java PNG encoder is to package JMagick:

http://www.yeo.id.au/jmagick/

Likely some glue code will be required to make it work with FOP.  Have
you asked the FOP maintainers why a JMagick back end doesn't exist yet?

Tom





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