Using the PDF2 plugin with FOP

The PDF2 plugin was originally designed by Idiom Technologies to work with the XEP formatting engine from RenderX.With a little work, it is possible to make it work with Apache FOP.

Suite Solutions has taken over lead responsibility for the plugin for DITA-OT 1.5.

In a future version of the toolkit (possibly DITA-OT 1.5), it is expected that the plugin will be integrated to the toolkit and set up to work with FOP without this customization step. These steps are designed for using DITA-OT 1.4.2 or 1.4.2.1 with version 1.4.2 of the PDF2 plugin.

Information to be created based on original work here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/dita-users/message/8222

Steps to use the plug-in:

1. Download and install DITA-OT (for this example, in C:\DITA-OT1.4.2.1)
2. Download and install PDF2 (FO) plugin in C:\DITA-OT1.4.2.1\demo\
3. Download and install FOP (in this example, installing fop 0.94 in c:\fop-0.94)
4. Create a c:\DITA-OT1.4.2.1\demo\fo\lib\xep directory and copy saxon.jar there
5. Edit c:\dita-ot1.4.2.1\demo\fo\build.xml with these changes:
   <!-- configure FO engines -->
   <property name="pdf.formatter" value="fop"/>
   <property name="fop.home" value="c:/fop-0.94"/>
   <condition property="use.xep.pdf.formatter">
   <equals arg1="${pdf.formatter}" arg2="xep"/>
   </condition>
   <condition property="use.fop.pdf.formatter">
   <equals arg1="${pdf.formatter}" arg2="fop"/>
   </condition>