Batik is only necessary to generate SVG output, right? I guess, a lot of people are using Fop to generate PDF only, but Fop needs batik.jar in any case because the driver initializes an "SVG element mapping":
org.apache.fop.apps.Driver.setupDefaultMappings() :
addElementMapping("org.apache.fop.svg.SVGElementMapping");
This method will throw a ClassNotFoundException when batik.jar is not in the classpath
Maybe the initialization of the element mapping could somehow be moved to SVG specific code. Ideally it would be included only when the output format requires Batik
Eckard
