General Comments
One new committer (Dieter von Holten, account creation pending) with write access to Batik. We hope this brings new energy into Batik.
Cameron McCormack (cam) joined the XML Graphics PMC.
XML Graphics Commons
Our new subproject XML Graphics Commons has finally started and has been populated with the first classes from Batik and FOP. Version 1.0 has been released 2006-04-17. We will continue to migrate components as time allows to work towards a clear dependency tree inside the XML Graphics project.
Batik
Steady activity rate with bugfixes and improvements. No releases. The Batik website is about to be converted to use Apache Forrest. Batik will be affected by the new license policy (Rhino, NPL). The move of the W3C licensed DOM API classes to XML Commons Externals is still not completed which is a precondition for the next release.
FOP
Lots of bugfixing and some new features, too. One release: 0.92 beta (2006-04-18). This is the last beta release before finally going for 1.0. It's also the first release to use XML Graphics Commons.
The API is now finalized and we're quickly approaching production grade for most use cases. We've been able to complete the rather long IP clearance process for the AFP renderer (took us more than 4 months) and we've been able to resurrect the PCL renderer, so FOP now has two new output formats.
We've got two students for the GSoC wanting to implement long-missing features: auto-table layout and floats. We hope the applications get through and we can get over another milestone for FOP.