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Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 08:54:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: Glen Mazza <grm7793@yahoo.com>
Subject: Change parent of FOText from FObj to FONode?
To: fop-dev@xml.apache.org
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Team,

FOP's fo.FOText class is used for text nodes (PCDATA)
found within the processing stream.  

For example, with:

<fo:block>This sentence is <fo:inline
font-weight="bold">really</fo:inline>
simple.</fo:block>

"This sentence is ", "really", and " simple." become
three separate FOText instances.

We have this class extending FObj but I would like to
have it to extending FONode instead (as it was doing a
few years back).  FOText is not really a formatting
object, so some of the FObj methods (such as
getName(), getNameId(), anything involving the
propertyList) don't fit for it.  Also, we need to
retain a getID() in FObj instead of just using
getPropertyString(PR_ID) because of this issue,
because FOText doesn't have a property list and so
gPS() for it causes NPE's to occur.

It appears to be a simple switch -- the change of
parameter types to about four or five methods total
within layout and the RTF library.  There *might* be
more subtle issues that may result in us not being
able to do this, but I don't see anything ATM and in
any event the changes here would be easy to undo.

Thoughts on/Objections to this?

Thanks,
Glen