User:Msulyaev/XEP

This article is a draft. I hope to update it and cast to a real one if time allows. Links are missing or wrong.

XEP is an XSL FO rendering engine written in Java. This is a proprietary software by RenderX. Personal version is available free of charge (the limitation is a stamp in the footer of each page).

Started in 1999 as a working prototype written in Perl and completely rewritten in Java soon, XEP has evolved to a powerful engine producing high quality print. XEP runs on any platforms where Java runtime is available, including Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and other server platforms.

It accepts XSL FO as input, as well as XML+XSL, and provides a variety of output formats: PDF, Postscript, AFP, PPML, XPS, HTML, SVG, and internal XML-based format called XEPOUT.

XEP demonstrates high performance, high quality output, conformance with XSL FO Recommendation v1.0, a wide range of useful extensions, and support for a good subset of XSL 1.1 features.

Available font types, depending on the output format generator, are Type1, TrueType, and OpenType, with the ability of embedding and subsetting.

Accepted images are most of flavors of raster graphics, SVG, EPS and PDF.

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, or in a small heap, or in diskless environments such as appservers, or on huge input documents, or altogether.

For users of Windows there exists a .Net wrapper called XEPWin, and accompanying .Net development kit with API in C#, VB, ASP.Net.

Satellite software includes EnMasse - a multiplexer of a grid of XEP engines, with simple networked API and examples in C, Java, Perl, Python.

Users are encouraged to try XEP and post their questions and feature requests to a public list xep-support@renderx.com, or bug reports to the dedicated support line support@renderx.com.