As promised, I've changed the way the logger is fetched in the PDF library and the font code. Instead of passing a Log instance from parent to child (IoC, like with Avalon), logging-enabled classes fetch their own logger via JCL's LogFactory. The code gets easier. I'm quite happy with this.
As you may have seen I added a cvsignore file in the src directory. The idea is to put a simplelog.properties (or other such configuration file) in the src/private-resources directory so you can configure the SimpleLog logger from Commons Logging. My current simplelog.properties looks like this: org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.showShortLogname=false org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.defaultlog=info org.apache.commons.logging.simplelog.log.org.apache.fop.pdf=trace Info about simplelog.properties can be found at [1]. One additional thing is to add a system property to each startup configuration in your IDE where you need to configure logging. Working with Eclipse I've added... -Dorg.apache.commons.logging.Log=org.apache.commons.logging.impl.SimpleLog ...to the "VM arguments" in the run configuration. This ensures that Commons Logging will not use JDK 1.4 logging (see [2]), but directly choose the SimpleLog implementation which is sufficient while developing. Of course, you can use JDK 1.4 loggging or Log4J, as you wish. See the javadocs for LogFactoryImpl [2] for further information. The whole documentation on Commons Logging is available at it homepage [3]. [1] http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/logging/api/org/apache/commons/logging/impl/SimpleLog.html [2] http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/logging/api/org/apache/commons/logging/impl/LogFactoryImpl.html [3] http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/logging/ For setting up Commons Logging for a command-line application, please see PFMReader and TTFReader for how I think it should be done. I'm not entirely comfortable, yet, as SimpleLog logs everything to System.err. For Barcode4J I wrote a special ConsoleLogger (for Avalon Logging) [4] that logs only WARN, ERROR and FATAL levels to System.err while sending the rest to System.out. Also, there's no possibility to get rid of the log level prefix in SimpleLog. In the end, it would probably be best to create a special CommandLineLog class which is tailored to this use case. [4] http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/barcode4j/barcode4j/src/java/org/krysalis/barcode4j/cli/AdvancedConsoleLogger.java?rev=1.1&view=auto Jeremias Maerki
