Integrating FOP With Oracle JDeveloper

Overview

An XML document does not include any formatting, except for the indentations. Therefore, for presentation purposes, a Formatting Object (also known as an FO or an XSL-FO) is included to provide additional information about layout, fonts, and data representation. Many J2EE developers convert XML documents to another format, such as PDF or PCL, to properly display the formatted data in the formatting object. FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is a print formatter for converting XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) to an output format such as PDF, PCL, PS, SVG, XML, Print, AWT, MIF, or TXT. This paper describes how to convert an example XML document to PDF with the FOP processor in Oracle JDeveloper; it assumes an existing Oracle JDeveloper install.