RenderX have made significant changes to
their licensing/pricing structure for XEP, their highly conformant XSL-FO engine
(for rendering PDF and Postscript files from XSL-FO source
files). An individual license for a nearly full-featured
"Stamped Edition" of the current version (XEP 3.02) is priced
at US$80, while an individual license for the fully-featured
standard "Client Edition" is US$300. Both versions can be purchased
online.
The "Stamped Edition" (which their site says is
"intended for tutoring/prototyping, but not for business
use") applies a small "stamp" to the footer of each page it
generates (the stamp contains a hyperlink to the RenderX
website). The license permits distribution of documents
generated with the Stamped Edition, with the restriction
that users a not permitted to manually remove the stamp
from the generated PDF files.
The "Client Edition", which does not apply a stamp to
generated pages, contains "everything that is needed to run
XEP as a standalone formatter, but excludes Java API". The
site does not mention any restrictions on distribution of
documents generated with the Client Edition.
Note that those prices are strictly for individual-use
end-user licenses; the price for a site license for the
"Server Edition" of XEP remains the same (currently,
US$5000 per server CPU, with no limit on the number of
users). An individual license for the "Developer Edition"
(currently priced at US$1000) is also available (it
includes API documentation and limited support hours and
enables developers to create applications that integrate
with XEP).
The significance of the new pricing is that it could
well help to put the promise of mature XSL-FO processing in
the hands of a lot more people -- that is, make it possible
for more people to author their document content in XML
with a real expectation of having a practical means to generate
high-quality PDF/print output from that content.
The licensing/pricing structure for the commercial
applications that are alternatives to XEP does not make
those applications practical for individual users to use.
There are also free-software/open-source alternatives (FOP
and Passivetex), but those have not been able to meet many
user's expectations (they are not yet mature, conformant
implementations of the XSL-FO specification, and are
currently impractical for use in doing production-quality
publishing).
XEP appears to be highly conformant with the XSL-FO
specification -- meaning that, in practice, most users will
find that the PDF and Postscript files it generates fully
meet their expectations about how their content should be
rendered.
An XSL Formatting Objects in XEP 3.0
document at the RenderX site provides details about XEP's
level of conformance with the specification.
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