High performance XSL-FO rendering for variable data printing

• Authors: Fabio Giannetti;Luiz Gustavo Fernandes;Rogerio Timmers;Thiago Nunes;Mateus Raeder;Márcio Castro
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing
• Year: 2006

High volume print jobs are getting more common due to the growing demand for personalized documents. In this context, Variable Data Printing (VDP) has become a useful tool for marketers who need to customize messages for each customer in promotion materials or marketing campaigns. VDP allows the creation of documents based on a template with variable and static portions. The rendering engine must be capable of transforming the variable portion into a resulting composed format, or PDL (Page Description Language) such as PDF, PS or SVG. The amount of variable content in a document is dependant on the publication layout. In addition, the features and the amount of the content to be rendered may vary according to the data loaded from the database. Therefore, the rendering process is invoked repeatedly and it can quickly become a bottleneck, especially in a production environment, compromising the entire document generation. In this scenario, high performance techniques appear to be an interesting alternative to increase the rendering phase throughput. This paper introduces a portable and scalable parallel solution for the Apache's rendering tool FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) which is used to render variable content expressed in XSL-FO (eXtensible Stylesheet Language-Formatting Objects). XSL-FO is extracted from a print job expressed in PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language), which is, in turn, obtained by the merging variable data in a template. The VDP Template is expressed using PPML/T (Personalized Print Markup Language Template).