Practical Usage

Most of the practical issues you’ll run into using FOP are related to rendering support. You should be aware of the limitations of the renderer you’ve chosen, what fonts that renderer supports, and, if you’re using images, which image formats work well with your renderer.

The operation of FOP is relatively straightforward. You set it up and tell it which renderer you want, and FOP should produce a result. There aren’t many configuration settings you need to be aware of.

Keep the following performance tip in mind. The FOP Driver has a method called reset that you can call after running the Driver. This method clears the internal data structures of the Driver so you can use the same Driver instance again. This saves the time spent in creating the Driver and the creation of the internal data structures. If you’re doing multiple FOP runs (and any serious application will), you should call reset between Driver invocations instead of allocating new Driver objects all the time.