FOP

FOP is the Apache hosted Open Source product that can be used to render documents marked up in XML to multiple rendering formats. The output formats include PDF, PCL and text. FOP processes XSL-FO compliant with the W3C recommendation and the PDF output is compliant with PDF Version 1.3 . Other desktop publishing output formats like MIF and RTF are also underway. FOP is the first of its kind which produces commercial quality print output with XSL formatting objects.

FOP is currently being used by a number of publishing firms to output high quality print documents, with editable data in XML. Many firms use it in house to generate reports based on data in databases transformed to XML. Organizations also use it as part of their products to generate print data.

Open Source FOP and Issues Facing Organizations

FOP has entirely been an Open Source initiative which has credited it with the best development and testing team being the Open Source community itself. Open source efforts that led to products like Linux and Perl have attained so much popularity and usage because of the large base of support available both commercially and freely via mailing-lists. XML and XSL being very recent and evolving standards there is no single point of support available for the Open Source tools associated with them. MindFire with its dynamic and young team of Open Source enthusiasts hopes to fill this gap.

Publishing firms which want to adopt XML as their data repository and look for tools to print and convert them to other formats have no recourse but to turn to commercial products which besdies being very expensive ties them down to a single source for development, testng and support. Many companies are now recognizing the advantages of using Open Source tools in their business needs. MindFire combines the best of what Open Source has to offer and the support that companies would expect to come with proprietary software.

FOP Support Centre

What is the FOP Support Centre?

It is the commercial support service provided by Mindfire Solutions for FOP, the XSL-FO renderer hosted at Apache. The programmers at Mindfire are leading Java professionals with many years of experience in creating and deploying SGML/XML applications.

What do we deliver?

Through our team of well trained support engineers and experienced testing team, we will diagnose and recreate the problem and recommend a solution. Our range of support covers XSLT transformations and all problems encountered during the usage of FOP.

The Support Centre will rapidly resolve the issue and if the problem requires a bug fix, will do so at the earliest. We offer a money return guarantee if you are not satisfied.

What support options do you offer and how much does it cost?

MindFire offers two levels of support:

FOP-Active: This level of support is the best offer for Fortune 1000 companies who need dedicated support in their XML publishing work using FOP. This service assures a quality assured customizable distribution of the latest FOP build and a reliable support package. Please write to fop-sales for more information about this service option.

FOP-Quick: This level of support caters to firms and individual users who use FOP in house or in projects and need bug-fixes or additional features periodically. The costs are listed below:

Per Incident Option $250
3 Incident Pack Option $650
6 Incident Pack Option $1200

How to submit an Incident?

Incidents maybe submitted by filling out the following information to fop-support

Contact Information:

Name:
Email:
Phone:
Company:

Incident Information:

Incident Title:
Fop Version used:
Description of incident (Please provide an accurate account of the issue and what you expected):

Sample Code (if applicable):

Any other comments:

Where can I download the "Out of memory" patch made by Mindfire?

We would appreciate if you fill in these details (optional) before downloading the "Out of memory" patch:

Please click here to download the Zip-file.
A Readme.txt is provided for license / installation instructions