Our newest white paper describes how to process large documents with XSL-FO and avoid memory errors. Here’s the introduction:
Formatting Object (FO) processors (FOP, in particular) often fail with memory errors when processing very large documents for PDF output. Typically in XSL:FO, the body of a document is contained in a single fo:page-sequence element. When FO documents are converted to PDF output, the FO processor holds an entire fo:page-sequence in memory to perform pagination adjustments over the span of the sequence. Very large page counts can result in memory overflows or Java heap space errors. Reducing page count in a document is not usually an option.
The full white paper is Handling XSL-FO’s memory issue with large page counts. Many thanks to David Kelly (writing), Simon Bate (reviewing), Alan Pringle (editing), and Ethan Duty (productioning, er, production).
As always, we welcome your comments here or directly in the white paper pages. If you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, we’re all ears.
Tags: dita, DITA Open Toolkit, White papers, xsl-fo