Flying Saucer Release R8pre2 Jan 27, 2008

xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net Please see project website for links to CVS, mailing lists, issue tracker, etc.

OVERVIEW


Flying Saucer is a pure-Java library for rendering arbitrary well-formed XML (or XHTML) using CSS 2.1 for layout and formatting, output to Swing panels, PDF, and images.

Comprehensive documentation available in our user's guide, xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/r7/users-guide-r7.html online or located under www/r7/users-guide-r7.html in the source. The documentation is current as of the R7 release. For information on our development releases (R8preX), please contact us on our mailing lists.

If you end up using Flying Saucer for your own projects, please drop us an email and tell us about it; it helps inform where we go next, and is interesting and inspiring to other developers.

LICENSE


Flying Saucer is distributed under the LGPL.Flying Saucer itself is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 or later, available at www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html. You can use Flying Saucer in any way and for any purpose you want as long as you respect the terms of the license. A copy of the LGPL license is included as license-lgpl-2.1.txt in our distributions and in our source tree.

Flying Saucer uses a couple of FOSS packages to get the job done. A list of these, along with the license they each have, is listed in the LICENSE file in our distribution.

WHAT'S IN THE DISTRIBUTION


"BINARY" DISTRIBUTION
---------------------
The binary distribution includes only those files you need to *use* Fying Saucer
in your own programs. The files are all Java JAR files and just need to be included
in the CLASSPATH as described in the User's Guide.

* core-renderer.jar: the main file, always in the classpath
* itext*.jar: support for generating PDF files as output
* minium*.jar: support for a custom anti-aliasing algorithm on output; may look better on some older JVMs

* core-renderer-minimal.jar: see note at end of this section

In principle, for an application using only Swing JPanels for output, you could
restrict yourself to using core-renderer.jar; however, we recommend you include
core*, itext* and minium* to avoid any linking errors/ClassNotFoundExceptions. When
in doubt, contact us via mail.

    "Minimal" Core JAR File
    -----------------------
    We now include a "minimal" core JAR file which does not contain X/HTML entity
    definitions and DTDs. If you have are not using entities, or have defined entities
    inline in your documents, you might use this JAR file for a smaller total download
    in your own applications--for example, for applets or webstartables. However, if you
    can spare the extra size, we recommend you just use the core-renderer.jar, which,
    while a little larger, will save you some time tracking down XHTML parsing-related
    errors.

"SOURCE" DISTRIBUTION
---------------------
The source distribution includes all the relevant source code, libraries and build
scripts to build and extend Flying Saucer. You'll need Ant if you want to use our
build scripts. There are some files under source control (notes, some docs) which
are not included in the source distribution. You can pull the whole lot from our source
tree by visiting our project website (URL at top of this doc) and extracting from
source control.

GETTING STARTED


Please see the user's guide (URLs listed above) for info on how to get started. At a minimum, you'll need core-renderer.jar in your classpath; itext*.jar for PDF output and minium.jar for alternate anti-aliasing in the renderer. Some good entry points (classes) are: org.xhtmlrenderer.simple.XHTMLPanel org.xhtmlrenderer.simple.PDFRenderer org.xhtmlrenderer.simple.ImageRenderer