High Performance XSL-FO Rendering for Variable Data Printing

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 use-ful tool for marketers who need to customize messages for each customer in promotion materials or marketing cam-paigns. 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 Descrip-tion Language) such as PDF, PS or SVG. The amount of variable content in a document is dependant on the publi-cation 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 bottle-neck, especially in a production environment, compromising the entire document generation. In this scenario, high per-formance techniques appear to be an interesting alternative to increase the rendering phase throughput. This paper in-troduces a portable and scalable parallel solution for the Apache’s rendering tool FOP (Formatting Objects Proces-sor) which is used to render variable content expressed in XSL-FO (eXtensible Stylesheet Language-Formatting Ob-jects). XSL-FO is extracted from a print job expressed i