I just started a project using FOP for the dynamic creation of Marketing Materials in PDF form, and with all of the talk about memory consumption, I began wondering if anyone has had any experience with large images in FOP, or knows how image processing in FOP works? The marketing materials I'm creating include product shots, which come out of our Digital Asset system as approximately 50MB TIFFs. I'm converting them to JPEGs, which brings the actual file size down considerably, but I'm getting some weird results after they go through the PDF Rendering process. If I do the image as a JPEG at full resolution (3990x4989 pixels), the resulting PDF has a black rectangle, where the image should be. If during the conversion to JPEG, I cut the dimensions in half (to 1995x2495 pixels), the PDF shows the image.
Does anyone know why the larger image is showing up all black? Is there a limit to the resolution of raster images FOP (or PDFs in general) can handle, or this perhaps a problem with memory? It appears the images contained within a PDF are compressed. Does anyone know if this compression is JPEG, and if so, does FOP just dump a given JPEG into the PDF file, or does it uncompress the original JPEG in memory, and then recompress it to go into the PDF? This information will help me to optimize the input file format for memory, processing time, and image quality. Finally, I haven't found a definitive list of the image types allowed in an external-graphic src attribute. Does anyone know where I might find such a list. I apologize for the length of the post. I just thought some background information might help, rather than launching into my questions. Any help (either direct nswers, or sources that might provide clues) would be greatly appreciated. -Jeff
