Re: [DOCS] PDF building with FOP

Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> As we are moving away from the old DSSSL toolchain, we also need to look
> into how we are building PDFs.
> The new way, using FOP, is called by
>     make postgres-A4-fop.pdf postgres-US-fop.pdf
> The questions for those who are building PDFs are
> - Can you make the build work?
> - Does the output look OK?

I poked at this a little bit.

* On RHEL 6: the available version of fop is 0.95, and it just fails
completely.  It looks like <title id="..."> constructs cause a
NullPointerException in some cases.  I tried installing fop 1.0
from back-rev Fedora SRPMs, but ran into dependency hell and gave
up for the time being.  I didn't look into whether the binary
downloads available from apache.org would work.

* On Fedora 25: the available version of fop is 2.0, and it seems
to Just Work.  I did not need to mess with memory settings.  And
it's enormously faster than the DSSSL toolchain, like 8x.

The output PDF varies quite a bit from what I get from DSSSL; it's got
slightly different font and spacing choices.  But it looks okay, and
the hyperlinks seem to work.

It would be slightly annoying for me to not be able to build PDFs on
my RHEL6 workstation; but thinking about that, the only reason I ever
do that is to precheck releases for occurrences of the dreaded
"\pdfendlink ended up in different nesting level than \pdfstartlink"
error.  We can hope that the fop toolchain hasn't got that problem.

I think we need some more research into what's the minimum recommendable
version of fop, but on the whole it seems like we can move forward.

BTW, the .gitignore for doc/src/sgml fails to ignore *.fo files.

            regards, tom lane