Installing the FO plugin

Today I struggled with installing and successfully generating PDF output using the FO plug-in. Once again, the problem was with the documentation. I started with the following documents:

• Pages from the Lone-DITA DITA Tutorial
• The readme for the Idiom FO plug-in

When I generated PDF output, I just got the default rendering -- no spiffy appearance and the ubiquitous RenderX graphic in the footer for each page. I checked the log out put and noticed that it contained the following message:

transform.fo2pdf:

transform.fo2pdf.xep:
[java] java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/renderx/xep/lib/Logger
[java] Exception in thread "main"
[java] Java Result: 1

I finally gave up and posted to the dita-user mailing list. Immediately afterwards I thought to check and see and see if XEP Personal Edition came with any documentation; it does, and the readme file told me how to start the XEP installation from a command line. Silly me -- when I had read the instructions in the plug-in readme, which states "Install XEP personal edition and license into demo/fo/lib/xep," I had thought it sufficient to simply copy the JAR and license.xml files to the specified directory.

It's just a little too complicated, I think. I've written a task topic that covers the necessary steps, but I need to test it by running the installation on another system.

The PDF output is much prettier no, 'tho :)