What is the use of Antennahouse over Apache FOP?

Question

I would like to know the difference and additional features of Antennahouse through Apache FOP.

Answer 1

I evaluate all commercial engines for almost 1 year, of which 6 months I worked with FOP; The main differences that I see:

FOP:

• Open source free
• Written in JAVA, it should work on what Java has on it (at least Windows, Linux, Solaris)
• Is still a preliminary alpha release (latest version is 0.95).
• To date, no one in the open source community has released anything for almost two years!
• It’s good if you have basic reports; does not support more advanced things (for example, table-layout = "auto", retrieves markers in the table headers and footers - part of XSL-FO 1.1 and is suitable for intermediate results, etc.).
• Some functions of the buggy (especially around footnotes, pagination of tables on different pages, etc.). It's harder to keep track of and appear later when you have already written your XSLT.
• It will consume a lot of memory - this is a problem if you want to run several reports at the same time (for example, if you have a website).

All commercial products have the following:

• Technical support (some vendors will even help you troubleshoot performance issues and debug your style sheets).
• Unicode (can handle most scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Thai, Wename, etc.).
• Compatibility XSL-FO 1.1.

Antenna house

• Commercial, $ 4000- $ 5000 range (1st processor)
• Cross-platform written in C ++ (works at least on Windows and Linux)
• Among the unique features: support for MathML, good support for Japanese writing (vertical recording from top to bottom)
• Extensions (barcodes, mathml) are available at an additional cost.

Ecrion

• Commercial, range $ 1,500- $ 3,500 (any processor)
• Cross-platform written in C ++ (works at least on Windows and Linux)
• Among the unique features: a good visual designer, Silverlight Word and PowerPoint, PDF formats.
• Very fast, extensions are provided as standard

Renderder

• Commercial, $ 3000- $ 4000 range (1st processor)
• Written in JAVA
• Among unique features: AFP support, PDF forms

If your reports are simple, you can do it. But my personal opinion is: do not go with the FOP if you have money for a commercial engine. I used to think that open source is cool, because I can change it myself - it’s not so easy to change, and in my opinion, it’s also very dangerous because you don’t know what functionality will be affected. The functionality is actually quite complicated, and therefore it is no longer actively being improved.

Answer 2

I like the XMLDUDE overview. At the same time, Apache FOP 1.0 was released. Over the years, Apache FOP has improved. But the competition also did not stop. Each of these sellers has their own specialties.

What is important to you?

The price of FOP is open source, but for example, we get RenderX XEP now for “free” because it is included in our XMetal package.

Speed If you run the conversion from XML to PDF in batch mode, you may have enough time. If you are performing a real-time conversion on a website, it should be as fast as possible.

Extensions Do you want to use only XSL-FO standards? Some manufacturers have a lot of extension elements that will not work in competitor software XSL-FO.

AntennaHouse, in the past, had a kind of FO preview, which was very useful for debugging.

Answer 3

It is worth remembering that if your requirement is to simply create a PDF from XML, you can do this with XSLT and LaTeX without the need for FO. The downside is that you need to know some LaTeX; upstairs LaTeX already knows about documents (XeLaTeX was originally UTF-8), works for anything, with formatting plug-ins (packages) and strong support for both commercial and volunteers.