Open Source Support FOP FOP is the Apache hosted Open Source product that can be used to render documents marked up in XML to multiple rendering formats. The output formats include PDF, PCL and text. Other desktop publishing output formats like MIF and RTF are also underway. FOP is the first of its kind which produces commercial quality print output with XSL formatting objects.
Organizations also use it as part of their products to generate print data.
Facing Organizations FOP has entirely been an Open Source initiative which has credited it with the best development and testing team being the Open Source community itself. Open source efforts that led to products like Linux and Perl have attained so much popularity and usage because of the large base of support available both commercially and freely via mailing-lists. MindFire with its dynamic and young team of Open Source enthusiasts hopes to fill this gap. Publishing firms which want to adopt XML as their data repository and look for tools to print and convert them to other formats have no recourse but to turn to commercial products which besdies being very expensive ties them down to a single source for development, testng and support. Many companies are now recognizing the advantages of using Open Source tools in their business needs.