FOP FAQ

FOP is a print formatter for XSL formatting objects.

It can be used to render an XML file containing XSL formatting objects into a page layout. The main target is PDF but other rendering targets are supported, such as AWT, PCL, text and direct printing.

FOP provides both an application and a library that converts an XSL FO document into paginated output.

The FOP command line application can be directly used to transform XML into PDF, PostScript, PCL and other formats, there is also an AWT based viewer integrated.

The library can be used in servlets and other Java applications.

It's an acronym for Formatting Object Processor

FOP is distributed with Cocoon as a PDF serializer for XSL (FO) documents.

Batik can be used with FOP to transcode an SVG image into a PDF document.

XSL is a W3C standard concerned with publishing XML documents. It consists of two parts: XSLT and XSLFO. The acronym expands to eXtensible Stylesheet Language.

XSLFO is an XML vocabulary that is used to specify a pagination and other styling for page layout output. The acronym “FO” stands for Formatting Objects. XSLFO can be used in conjunction with XSLT to convert from any XML format into a paginated layout ready for printing or displaying.

XSLFO defines a set of elements in XML that describes the way pages are set up. The contents of the pages are filled from flows. There can be static flows that appear on every page (for headers and footers) and the main flow which fills the body of the page.

Synonyms: XSL FO, XSL (FO), XSL:FO, XSL-FO, Formatting Objects

XSLT describes the transformation of arbitrary XML input into other XML (like XSLFO), HTML or plain text. The “T” comes from Transformation. For historical reasons, a transformation is often also called a “style sheet”.

Synonyms: XSL transformation, XSL:T, XSL style sheet.

There are numerous ways that you can help. They are outlined in the Developer's Introduction.

FOP was changed to be in accordance with the latest standard (see XSL standard).The page master for a fo:page-sequence is now refereced by the master-reference attribute. Replace the master-name attributes of your fo:page-sequence elements by master-reference attributes. You have to do this also for fo:single-page-master-reference, fo:repeatable-page-master-reference and fo:conditional-page-master-reference elements in you page master definitions.

Update your FO documents and style sheets.

This is typically a problem with your classpath.

If you are running FOP from the command line:

• Use the fop.bat or fop.sh command file from the FOP distribution. If you have a FOP version older than 0.20.5, ensure the directory where FOP and these files have been installed is the current working directory.
• If this doesn't help, check whether still all the jar files mentioned in the classpath in the fop.bat file are in their respective places.

If you run FOP embedded in your servlet, web application or other Java application, check the classpath of the application. Check the also the information pertaining servlet engines for further hints.

This is usually caused by an older version of one of the FOP jars or old XML tools in the classpath. Check in particular for parser.jar, jaxp.jar, xml4j.jar or lotusxsl.jar.

Incompatible versions of Batik may also cause this problem. Use the version of Batik that comes with FOP. It is not always possible to use a more recent version of Batik.

See FOP Memory.

What you probably think of as "file names" are usually URLs, in particular the src attribute of fo:external-graphic.

Because usage of URLs is growing, you should make yourself familiar with it. The relevant specification is RFC 2396.

In a nutshell, the correct syntax for an absolute file URL is file:///some/path/file.ext on Unix and file:///z:/some/path/file.ext on Windows systems. Note the triple slash, and also that only forward slashes are used, even on windows.

A relative file URL starts with anything but a slash, and doesn't have the file: prefix, for example file.ext, path/file.ext or ../file.ext. The string file:path/file.ext is not a relative URL, in fact, it isn't a valid URL at all. A relative URL is subject to a resolving process, which transforms it into an absolute URL.

This is often caused by an invalid FO document. Currently only very common errors are intercepted and produce a comprehensible error message. If you forgot container elements like fo:page-sequence or fo:flow and put blocks and inline elements directly as children of fo:root or fo:page-sequence, you'll only get a NullPointerException. Check whether your FO file has a proper structure. In some cases there are mandatory properties, like the master-reference in fo:conditional-page-master-reference, check also whether you got them right.

You may find it helpful to use the validation tools to validate your FO document. This will catch most problems, but should not be relied upon to catch all.

If you use XSLT, problems in your style sheet and in your source XML also can produce a NullPointerException. Run the transformation separately to check for this, usually you'll get a detailed error message from the XSLT processor.

If you turn on debugging with the "-d" option you may be able to see more detailed information.

See the article "Review FOP's Standards Compliance".

The most likely reason is a known problem with the Java run time environment which is triggered by rendering SVGs. Suns JDK 1.4 does not have this problem. See also FOP does not exit if a SVG is included.

Another possibility is that FOP went into a non terminating loop. Usually this is indicated by lots of log messages of the form "[INFO]: [NNNN]" which indicate a new page has been started or box overflows. After some time, FOP will crash with an OutOfMemoryException.

If you called the FOP command line application from some other programm, for example from Java using Runtime.exec(), it may hang while trying to write log entries to the output pipe. You have to read the FOP output regularly to empty the pipe buffer. It is best to avoid exec'ing FOP, use the library interface instead.

There is something too large to fit into the intended place, usually a large image, a table whose rows are kept together or a block with a space-before or space-after larger than the page size. Catch the first page showing this phenomenon and check it. If it is not obvious which element causes the trouble, remove stuff until the problem goes away. Decrease the dimensions of the offending element or property, or increase the dimension of the enclosing element or container, or remove keep-with-* properties.

The src attribute of the fo:external-graphics element requires a URI, not a file name. See External Resources for more information about specifying URIs.

Did you get: «Failed to read font metrics file C:\foo\arial.xml : File "C:\foo\arial.xml" not found»? The value for the metrics-file attribute in the user config file is actually an URL, not a file name. Use "file:///C:/foo/arial.xml" instead.

If you used a relative URL, make sure your application has the working directory you expect. Currently FOP does not use the baseDir for resolving relative URLs pointing to font metric files.

Try also setting the fontBaseDir configuration. (FIXME: add link to congfiguration page)

Leaders still work, in fact they work better than ever before. You'll just have to add text-align="justify" and/or text-align-last="justify" to the block with the leader. Be sure you haven't accidentally overridden the leader-length.maximum="100%" default value.

Earlier versions of FOP used to expand a leader to fill the rest of the line unconditionally, anything following it, like page numbers in a TOC, was actually shifted beyong the right margin.

The new implementation uses leader-length.optimum to determine where to break the line, and expands the leader only further if the line should be filled, as indicated by the text-aling and text-align-last properties.

Actually due to the fuzzyness of the specification both the old and the new method are conformant (although adding text after the expanded leader in the old variant never was).

If you want to have a longer ruler or space in a non-justified line, you have to increase the leader-length.optimum property.

This is because spec conformance has been improved.

The force-page-count property controls how a FO processor pads page sequences in order to get certain page counts or last page numbers. The default is "auto". With this setting, if the next page sequence begins with an odd page number because you set the initial-page-number, and the current page sequence also ends with an odd page number, the processor inserts a blank page to keep odd and even page numbers alternating (similar for the case the current page sequence ends with an even page number and the next page sequence starts with an even page number.

If you don't want to have this blank page, use force-page-count="no-force".

Most commonly, the external file is not being found by FOP. Check the following:

• Empty or wrong baseDir setting.
• Spelling errors in the file name (including using the wrong case).
• Security Problems (i.e. image was not delivered because FOP is not allowed to read the file). This is especially a problem if the external file is retrieved over HTTP. Possible issues include security settings on the server, server configuration, and missing cookies or other authorization information. Any easy way to check this is to cut&paste the source URL from the fo:external-graphic into the Location field of a browser on the machine where the FOP process will be running.

Other possibilities:

• The image format is not supported or not supported completely. See FOP Graphics Formats for a list of supported formats and related issues.
• The graphic may be too large to fit into the intended space.
• There may be something (static content) that is obscuring the graphic. (This is very rare).

See FOP Graphics Formats for a list of supported formats and related issues.

See Graphics Resolution.

These properties are not implemented, except on table rows. In order to take advantage of them, you have to nest stuff to be kept together in a table.

The concept is called “blind table”. The table is used for pure layout reasons and not obvious in the output.

An example of an image and the image caption to be kept together:

<fo:table table-layout="fixed" width="100%">
  <fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(1)"/>
  <fo:table-body>
    <fo:table-row keep-with-next="always">
      <fo:table-cell>
        <fo:block>
          <fo:external-graphic src="foo.jpg"/>
        </fo:block>
      </fo:table-cell>
    </fo:table-row>
    <fo:table-row>
      <fo:table-cell>
        <fo:block>Image Caption</fo:block>
      </fo:table-cell>
    </fo:table-row>
  </fo:table-body>
</fo:table>

Check for fo:table-body around the rows. FOP up to 0.20.4 doesn't raise an error if it is omitted, it just drops the content. More recent releases will catch this problem.

Also, the fo:table-with-caption element is not implemented, tables within such an element are dropped too. FOP generates an error message for this problem. The DocBook style sheets generate fo:table-with-caption elements, so watch out.

Clipping as specified by the overflow="hidden" is not yet implemented. If you have long words overflowing table cells, try to get them hyphenated. Artificial names like product identifications or long numbers usually aren't hyphenated. You can try special processing at XSLT level, like

• clip long text,
• explicit wrapping+clipping,
• insert zero width spaces (U+200B or ​) to allow FOP to wrap.

Check the XSL FAQ and the XSL list archive for how to perform these tasks.

This happens for fo:page-number-citation elements if the citation occurs before FOP formatted the requested page, usually in TOC or index pages. It is caused by the problem that FOP has to guess how much space the yet unknown page number will occupy, and usually the guesses are somewhat off.

The most recent FOP releases should have this problem fixed. Check whether you can upgrade.

Set the language attribute somewhere and explicitly enable hyphenation. Check whether you use a language for which hyphenation is supported. Supported languages can be deduced from the files in the {fop-dir}/src/hyph directory of the FOP source distribution. If you want to use a language FOP currently doesn't hyphenate, please see the Configuration page.

Set the language (on fo:page-sequence, fo:block or fo:character):

<fo:page-sequence language="fi">

Enable hyphenation on a block:

<fo:block hyphenate="true">

See Using FOP in a Servlet.

See Using FOP in a Servlet with XSLT Transformation.

See Using FOP in a Servlet with XSLT Transformation.

Declare the fonts in the userconfig.xml file as usual. See loading the user configuration file for further details.

See Setting the Configuration Programmatically.

See Using a Configuration File in an Embedded App.

See Servlet Engines.

See Multithreading FOP.

See Placing SVG Text into PDF.

See FOP: Graphics (Batik).

Applies to older FOP versions and JDK 1.3 and older. That's because there is an AWT thread hanging around. The solution is to put a System.exit(0) somewhere.

This is really a "resolving relative URI" problem with some twists. The problem is that the #stuff URL fragment identifier is resolved within the current SVG document. So the reference must be valid within the XML subset and it cannot reference other SVG documents in the same XML file. Some options to try:

• Put the SVG into a separate file and use it with fo:external-graphics.
• Use a separate SVG file which contains only the gradient (and perhaps other SVG stuff you want to reference) and point an absolute URL to it: fill="url(file:///c:/refstuff/grad.svg#PurpleToWhite)".
• Same as above but use a relative URL: fill="url(grad.svg#PurpleToWhite)". This may be easier to deploy.
• Make sure that the reference is valid in the current SVG document.

In any case, the referenced stuff has to be pointed to by an URL. It doesn't necessarily have to be a file URL, HTTP should also work. Also, expect a performance hit in all cases, because another XML file has to be retrieved and parsed.

Ultimately, both FOP and especially Batik should be fixed to make your code work as expected, but this will not only take some time but also some effort by a standard committee in order to make the semantics of this kind of references in embedded SVG clearer.

See also MalformedURLException

See SVG Scaling.

See the Fonts page for information about embedding fonts.

This usually means the selected font doesn't have a glyph for the character.

The standard text fonts supplied with Acrobat Reader have mostly glyphs for characters from the ISO Latin 1 character set. For a variety of reasons, even those are not completely guaranteed to work, for example you can't use the fi ligature from the standard serif font. Check the overview for the default PDF fonts.

If you use your own fonts, the font must have a glyph for the desired character. Furthermore the font must be available on the machine where the PDF is viewed or it must have been embedded in the PDF file. See embedding fonts.

For most symbols, it is better to select the symbol font explicitely, for example in order to get the symbol for the mathematical empty set, write:

<fo:inline font-family="Symbol">&#x2205;</fo:inline>

The "#" shows up if the selected font does not define a glyph for the required character, for example if you try:

<fo:inline font-family="Helvetica">&#x2205;</fo:inline>

See PDF Post-processing.

See PDF Encryption. See also PDF Post-processing.

See PDF Post-processing.

See PDF Watermarks.

Check the paper size in Acrobat settings and the "fit to page" print setting. Contorted printing is often caused by a mismatched paper format, for example if the setting is "US Letter" but the PDF was made for A4. Sometimes also the printer driver interferes, check its settings too.

FOP does not currently support this feature. Possible workarounds include those mentioned in the PDF Post-Processing FAQ.

This is a problem of Internet Explorer requesting the content several times. Please see the notes on Internet Explorer for more information.

It depends whether you mean "printing to a printer under control of the server" or "printing on the client's printer".

For the first problem, look at the print servlet in the FOP examples. You'll have to gather any printer settings in a HTML form and send it to the server.

For the second task, you can use some client side script to start Acrobat Reader in print mode, or use a Java applet based on the FOP print servlet. This depends heavily on the client installation and should not relied on except in tightly controlled environments.

See also http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fop-dev&m=101065988325115&w=2

See XSL-FO Vertical Centering.

See XSL-FO Horizontal Centering (Tables).

See Recto/Verso Static Content Differences.

See Recto/Verso Static Content Differences.

See Making the First Page Special.

See Blank Pages.

See Special Characters.

See Preformatting Content.

See Total Document Pages.

See Aligning Regions.

See Drawing Lines.

See Validating XSL-FO.

See XML Special Characters.

See XML Special Characters.

See Using HTML Character Names.

See XML Encoding Issues.

See the Bugs page for information about bugs already reported and how to report new ones.

• If your question is a development-related question, please see the Developer FAQs.
• If you have a runtime exception or other runtime problem:
  • double-check the Runtime FAQs.
  • ClassNotFoundException, NoSuchMethodException and NoSuchFieldException problems are almost always a problem with the local environment. Try to get local help first.
  • Check Reported Issues to see if this is a known problem.
  • If none of the above apply, post a question to the fop-dev mailing list.
• In the case where something works properly with another formatter, (AntennaHouse, PassiveTex, etc.) but doesn't work with FOP, please check the Release Notes, the FOP Standards Compliance document, and the remaining FAQ in this document. If not found there, look at the list of Bugs Already Reported. If not found there, please post a question on the fop-user mailing list or Open a New Bug.
• Question about how to use FOP, how to perform certain tasks with FOP or how to integrate FOP into another application should be posted to fop-user.
• XSLT specific stuff sould go to the XSL list. This includes problems with the language and XSLT HOW-TOs.
• Problems specific to a certain XSLT processor, like Xalan, Saxon or MSXML, should be handled by processor specific lists. This includes problems with deployment, processor specific extensions, suspected bugs and processor specific APIs. Note that JDK 1.4 comes with an XML parser and an XSLT processor which are older versions of Xerces and Xalan, respectively, and both have a number of annoying bugs. See $$$FIXME on how to use more recent versions or other packages instead.
• Problems with servlet containers should be asked on the vendor specific lists for these software packages.
• More general questions regarding Java, including deployment, Java APIs, classpath issues and property definitions should be redirected to some Java specific list.