XEP (software)
| Developer(s) | RenderX |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 4.18 / March 2010 |
| Written in | Java |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD |
| Type | Layout engine |
| Website | http://www.renderx.com/tools/xep.html |
XEP is a commercial XSL-FO layout engine written in Java mainly used to convert XML to PDF. XEP is proprietary software by RenderX.
History
Started in 1999 as a working prototype written in Perl and completely rewritten in Java soon after, XEP has evolved into a complete engine. XEP runs on any platform where Java runtime is available, including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and other server platforms.
Features
XEP accepts XSL-FO as input, as well as XML+XSLT. Its output formats are: PDF, PostScript, AFP, PPML, XPS, HTML, SVG, and internal XML-based format called XEPOUT.
XEP demonstrates conformance with XSL-FO Recommendation v1.0, a wide range of extensions, and support for a good subset of XSL 1.1 features.[1]
Available font types, depending on the output format generator, are Type 1, TrueType and OpenType, with the ability of embedding and subsetting.
Accepted images are most of flavors of raster graphics, SVG, EPS and PDF.
API
For integration XEP provides API in Java and examples covering a number of approaches such as SAX, JAXP and DOM. XEP has a flexible configuration, which allows running it concurrently in threads on huge input documents, but also in a small heap in diskless environments such as appservers.
Satellite software
For Windows users there exists a .NET wrapper called XEPWin, and an accompanying .NET development kit with API in C#, VB and ASP.NET.
Satellite software includes EnMasse - a multiplexer of a grid of XEP engines, with simple networked API and examples in C, Java, Perl and Python.