what is benefit of using Antennahouse over Apache FOP?

Question

I would like to know the difference and additional features in Antennahouse over Apache FOP.

Answer 1

I have been evaluating all commercial engines for almost 1 year now out of which 6 months I spent working with FOP; the main differences that I see are:

FOP:

• Open source, free
• Written in JAVA, it should work on anything that has Java on it (at least Windows, Linux, Solaris)
• Is still pre-alpha release (last version is 0.95)
• As of today, nobody in the open source community has released anything for almost 2 years!
• Good if you have basic reports; doesn't support the more advanced stuff (like table-layout="auto", retrieving markers in table headers/footers - part of XSL-FO 1.1 and good for subtotals, etc.)
• Some features are buggy (especially around footnotes, breaking tables across pages, etc). These are harder to track and will pop-up later on when you have already written your XSLTs.
• Will consume a lot of memory - this is an issue if you want to run multiple reports in the same time (for example if you have a web site).

All commercial products have the following:

• Technical support (some vendors will even help you troubleshoot performance issues and debug your stylesheets).
• Are Unicode (can handle most scripts like Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Thai, Vienamese, etc.)
• Are XSL-FO 1.1 compatible.

Antenna House

• Commercial, $4000-$5000 range (1st CPU)
• Written in C++, cross platform (works at least on Windows and Linux)
• Among unique features: support for MathML, good support for Japanese writing (top to bottom vertical writing)
• Extensions (barcodes, mathml) are provided at extra charge

Ecrion

• Commercial, $1500-$3500 range (any CPU)
• Written in C++, cross platform (works at least on Windows and Linux)
• Among unique features: a good Visual Designer, Silverlight Word and PowerPoint output, PDF forms
• Very fast, extensions are provided standard

RenderX

• Commercial, $3000-$4000 range (1st CPU)
• Written in JAVA
• Among unique features: AFP support, PDF forms

If your reports are simple, you can give it a shot. But my personal opinion is: don't go with FOP if you have the money to spend on a commercial engine. I used to think that being open source is cool because I can change it myself - it is not that easy to change, and my opinion is that is also very risky because you don't know what functionality will be affected. The functionality is actually quite complex, and that is why is not being actively improved anymore.

Answer 2

Worth remembering that if your requirement is just to produce PDF from XML, you can do this with XSLT and LaTeX without any need to involve FO. The downside is you need to know some LaTeX; the upside is LaTeX already knows about documents (XeLaTeX is natively UTF-8), runs on anything, with plugins for formatting (packages), and strong support both commercial and volunteer.

Answer 3

I like the overview of XMLDUDE In the mean time Apache FOP 1.0 has been released. Over the years Apache FOP improved a lot. But the competition didn't stop either. Each of those vendors have their specialties.

What's important for you?

Price FOP is open-source, but for example we get RenderX XEP now for "free" because it is included in our XMetal suite.

Speed If you run your conversion from XML to PDF in a batch, you maybe have plenty of time. If you run your conversion at "real-time" on a website, it must be as quick as possible.

Enhancements Do you want to use only the XSL-FO standards? Some vendors very much extension elements which will not work in the competitor XSL-FO software.

AntennaHouse, in the past had a kind of FO preview which was very useful for debugging.