The FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) package contains a print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO). It is a Java application that reads a formatting object tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output. Output formats currently supported include PDF, PCL, PostScript, SVG, XML (area tree representation), print, AWT, MIF and ASCII text. The primary output target is PDF.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Download (HTTP): https://archive.apache.org/dist/xmlgraphics/fop/source/fop-2.9-src.tar.gz
Download MD5 sum: f7537ca7f2e16971fa99c8bb0dad62c7
Download size: 20 MB
Estimated disk space required: 333 MB (including files downloaded to the user directory)
Estimated build time: 0.9 SBU
Required Additional Downloads:
Maven build system:
https://archive.apache.org/dist/maven/maven-3/3.9.4/binaries/apache-maven-3.9.4-bin.tar.gz
0698a533397eda60cbebcc0fb68ae842
9.0 MB (additionally, about 90 MB are downloaded to the building user's directory)
Recommended packages
Objects for Formatting Objects (OFFO) hyphenation patterns:
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/offo/2.2/offo-hyphenation.zip
bf9c09bf05108ef9661b8f08d91c2336
862 KB
a graphical environment (to run tests), JAI Image I/O Tools, and JEuclid
Ensure $JAVA_HOME is set correctly before beginning
the build. To build the JIMI SDK and/or
XMLUnit extension classes, ensure the
corresponding .jar files can be
found via the CLASSPATH environment variable.
Copy the XML hyphenation patterns into the fop source tree by running the following commands:
unzip ../offo-hyphenation.zip && cp offo-hyphenation/hyph/* fop/hyph && rm -rf offo-hyphenation
Starting with fop-2.5, the Maven build system is required. We use the binary provided by apache, that we install in a temporary location:
tar -xf ../apache-maven-3.9.4-bin.tar.gz -C /tmp
The javadoc command that ships with OpenJDK 10 and later has become much stricter than previous versions regarding conformance of the Javadoc comments in source code to HTML. The FOP documentation does not meet those standards, so the conformance checks have to be disabled. This can be done with the following command:
sed -i '\@</javad@i\
<arg value="-Xdoclint:none"/>\
<arg value="--allow-script-in-comments"/>\
<arg value="--ignore-source-errors"/>' \
fop/build.xmlCompile fop by running the following commands:
cd fop && LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 \ PATH=$PATH:/tmp/apache-maven-3.9.4/bin \ ant all javadocs && mv build/javadocs .
This package comes with a test suite, but the java infrastructure installed in this book does not allow running it.
Now, install Fop as the
root user:
install -v -d -m755 -o root -g root /opt/fop-2.9 && cp -vR build conf examples fop* javadocs lib /opt/fop-2.9 && chmod a+x /opt/fop-2.9/fop && ln -v -sfn fop-2.9 /opt/fop
The last thing to do is to clean what we have done:
rm -rf /tmp/apache-maven-3.9.4
sed -i ... build.xml: This adds three switches to the javadoc command, preventing some errors from occurring when building the documentation.
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8: the compiler fails if using an ASCII locale.
ant target: This reads the file
build.xml and builds the target: compile
compiles the java sources, jar-main generates
jar archives, jar-hyphenation generates the hyphenation
patterns for FOP, junit runs the
junit tests, and javadocs
builds the documentation. The all target runs all of the
above.
ln -v -sf fop-2.9 /opt/fop: This is
optional and creates a convenience symlink so that
$FOP_HOME doesn't have to be changed each time there's a
package version change.
Using fop to process some large FO's (including the FO derived from the BLFS XML sources), can lead to memory errors. Unless you add a parameter to the java command used in the fop script you may receive messages similar to the one shown below:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap
space
To avoid errors like this, you need to pass an extra parameter to
the java command used in the fop
script. This can be accomplished by creating a
~/.foprc (which is sourced by the
fop script) and adding the parameter to the
FOP_OPTS environment variable.
The fop script looks for a
FOP_HOME environment variable to locate the
fop class libraries. You can create this
variable using the ~/.foprc file as well. Create
a ~/.foprc file using the following commands:
cat > ~/.foprc << "EOF"
FOP_OPTS="-Xmx<RAM_Installed>m"
FOP_HOME="/opt/fop"
EOF
Replace <RAM_Installed> with a
number representing the amount of RAM installed in your computer (in
megabytes). An example would be
FOP_OPTS="-Xmx768m".
To include the fop script in your path,
update the system-wide profile with the following command as the
root user:
cat > /etc/profile.d/fop.sh << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/profile.d/fop.sh
pathappend /opt/fop
# End /etc/profile.d/fop.sh
EOF
Running fop can be somewhat verbose.
The default logging level can be changed from INFO to any of
FINEST, FINER, FINE, CONFIG, INFO, WARNING, SEVERE, ALL, or OFF.
To do this, edit
$JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/logging.properties and change
the entries for .level and
java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level to
the desired value.
/opt/fop/{build,lib}; JAI
components include libmlib_jai.so, jai_codec.jar, jai_core.jar, and
mlibwrapper_jai.jar