<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
  Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
  contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
  this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
  The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
  (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
  the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

  Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
  distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
  WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
  See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
  limitations under the License.
-->
<!-- $Id: fop-history.xml 633559 2008-03-04 17:35:52Z jeremias $ -->
<section>
  <title tab-width="60">Project History</title>
  <p>
    The initial code for the Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) was contributed to the 
    Apache Software Foundation by James Tauber in 1999.
  </p>
  <p>
    The project evolved with the W3C specification and was quickly adopted by many. In July of 2003, 
    the most famous version of FOP, 0.20.5, was released. It is now used to produce documents all 
    over the globe.
  </p>
  <p>
    Even before release 0.20.5 a redesign effort commenced to address short-comings 
    that prevented important features from being implemented using the current design.
  </p>
  <p>
    In October 2004, Batik and FOP joined forces and together formed the XML Graphics project.
    This change was made to scale down the old Apache XML project, to improve
    project oversight, and to allow for better collaboration because Batik and
    FOP share many similarities.
  </p>
  <p>
    In 2005, the redesign finally took a leap forward, which resulted in the first release from
    the new codebase (FOP&#160;0.90alpha). The project team has published a number of releases
    since then. FOP made big steps forward.
  </p>
  <p>
    The next version, to be released in March&#160;2008, will be 0.95. Although FOP still carries
    pre&#160;1.0 version numbers it is production-ready. Some features are still missing before
    version&#160;1.0 can be released.
  </p>
</section>
