General Comments
There are no project-level issues. The project continues to live off a relatively small set of active committers. The PMC chair is a little concerned about the number of active committers in the Batik area. The 1.7 release was basically performed by a single committer. However, oversight is still guaranteed. User activity is steady and support is working.
The whole project has now dropped support for Java 1.3 and requires Java 1.4 after the release of Batik 1.7. We're looking towards other projects to find long-term, joint solutions for PDF generation, font and metadata handling (most notably PDFBox and Tika).
XML Graphics Commons
A redesign of the image loading code in FOP resulted in a new image loading framework in Commons. It is highly extensible and supports loading all sorts of images (bitmap, vector) and converting them to a format supported by the consumer. Besides that, smaller bugfixes happened, as well as a few improvements for the XMP metadata handling code.
Batik
Version 1.7 was released. An XML editor component with syntax highlighting was donated and integrated. But the release preparations (bugfixing, documentation etc.) dominated the whole last reporting period. Besides that the development front is relatively quiet especially since the release.
FOP
The most notable changes in the last three months were: improvements and bugfixes for tables, the integration of a new image loading framework, various small improvement with font handling. Besides that the usual bugfix or feature here and there. Things currently underway are improved page layout, GOCA support (Java2D paintings) for AFP output and a processing feedback mechanism. The next release (0.95) is targeted for the end of February or beginning of March.