jfor homepage - Open-Source Java XSL-FO to RTF converter

NEWS


WHAT IS JFOR?

jfor (*) converts XML documents conforming to the XSL-FO specification to RTF format, the goal being to use the same XSL-FO documents (as often generated using XSLT transforms) to generate PDF (using FOP or similar) and RTF (using jfor) documents.

jfor is licensed under its own Apache-style license, found under http://www.jfor.org/jfor-license.html. Releases prior to V0.7.0 used the Mozilla Public License V1.1, but this was changed to make it possible to distribute jfor with projects of the Apache Software Foundation (like Cocoon).

Through an intermediate transformation to XSL-FO, jfor can be used to convert any raw or XML data to RTF format.

jfor comes without any warranty of any kind. Use at your own risk. No guts, no glory.

Although there are PDF-to-RTF converters, the RTF that they generate usually loses too much structure to be easily editable. jfor uses a simple mapping from XSL-FO to RTF without any layout computations, which means that the conversion is much faster than with FOP, for example (because jfor has much less to do - there's no magic here).

jfor attempts to preserve the structure of the document (a table is a table, a list is a list, etc.), which can cause some loss of presentation information (distances between elements, etc.).

During development, we usually test jfor with:

Both a command-line converter and an adapter for Cocoon 1.8 are provided.
For Cocoon 2 see http://www.jfor.org/jfor-cocoon-howto.html

jfor also includes a general-purpose RTF generation library (see package ch.codeconsult.jfor.rtflib.testdocs for usage examples).

More information about XSL-FO, XSL and XML can be found on www.xml.com and www.w3c.org, among others.
See also Dave Pawson's FO questions.

LINKS

HOW TO COMPILE, RUN, ETC.

See jfor-readme.html.

THE TEAM

The persons listed below are the major contributors. In addition, several people have provided smaller fixes and ideas, which are acknowledged directly in the source code. Please let us know if you see something wrong or missing in this list.

  Links
Bertrand Delacrétaz: project manager and lead developer Bertrand's homepage.
Bertrand's wishlist.
Andreas Putz: major code contributions, including image handling. www.skynamics.com
Chris Scott: major code contributions that "make it look good".  
Roberto Marra: many bug fixes in the converter and RTF library packages. www.link-u.com
Boris Poudérous: paragraph spacing and color attributes handling, page-number-citation, etc.. Boris's whishlist
Laurent Caprani: provided interesting insight and analysis of RTF constructs.  
Gianugo Rabellino: Cocoon 2 serializer + build.xml changes for conditional compilation of Cocoon modules .  

GIVING BACK

If jfor has helped you in any way, you're most welcome to give something back to the project so that it can live on. Large or small does not matter much, but giving back or not makes a lot of difference!
You can give something back by:

LIMITATIONS

As of V0.7.1, jfor has limited support of FO blocks, inline elements, lists, tables and images. Generated documents can look really nice if you're careful to work within the current limitations.
Using jfor to convert the files found in the "samples" directory of the source distribution will give you a good overview of jfor's current capabilities and limitations.
 
* jfor=Java xsl-FO to Rtf converter
SourceForge Logo hosts the jfor project.