Hello all, I am the main developer of PDFBox, an open source(BSD) PDF library.
FOP contains PDF library functionality(specifically classes in org.apache.fop.pdf.*) and PDFBox is a PDF library. Because they do very similar things they contain a lot of overlapping code, but the pdf package in FOP has some features that PDFBox does not and PDFBox has some features that the FOP pdf package does not. I propose that classes in FOP's package be 'merged' into the PDFBox library and FOP utilize PDFBox for PDF functionality. I think we should do this for a variety of reasons; -PDFBox & FOP benefit by gaining functionality -PDFBox & FOP benefit by having a larger user base, which means code is used more, tested more, contributed to more -The entire community benefits by having higher quality PDF components available -There are several projects that currently take FOP output and perform post processing with PDFBox, this could be optimized if FOP used PDFBox as its core -Future core PDF development efforts will no longer be duplicated between these two projects I wanted to gauge interest from FOP developers and start to think about how we can make this work. What do you guys think? Ben Litchfield http://www.pdfbox.org/