oXygen stalls creating PDF file

This one has got me a couple of times recently, so it's probably more for my benefit than anyone else's.

When generating PDFs using oXygen, the PDFs are created correctly when using oXygen's internal DITA-OT. However, when I switch to using my own DITA-OT, the transform stalls when creating the .PDF from the .FO. As usual, oXygen's tech support came to the rescue...

Seems that "with Windows XP, Apache FOP blocks the console before the PDF is generated", whatever that means.

oXygen have introduced a patch into their internal DITA-OT to get around this. So you need to copy this patch across to your external DITA-OT version to benefit from the patch:

1. In the build.xml file, search for the "transform.fo2pdf.fop" target.
2. Comment out the target template and replace it with the following one:

<target name="transform.fo2pdf.fop" if="use.fop.pdf.formatter">
<java classname="org.apache.fop.cli.Main" fork="yes" classpath="${java.class.path}" dir="${dita.map.output.dir}" failonerror="true">
  <arg line="-fo "${inputfile}" -pdf "${outputFile}" -c "${fop.home}/conf/fop.xconf"/>
<java>
<target>

Figure sizes for DITA output to PDF

We will be having some people using FOP and others using XEP to generate PDF files. It's actually quite difficult to set the width and height attributes of figures so that graphics look good in both formats. Here are some recommendations:
- FOP and XEP only have a very limited number of supported formats in common: GIF, JPEG and PNG for bitmaps and SVG for vectorials.
- Only specify the width. The DITA-OT will then calculate the height automatically so as to preserve the original aspect ratio.
- Specify the width in "real" width units, for example "10mm" or "3in".
- For vectorial graphics, specify the same width value for all graphics to obtain a cleaner output. In the old FrameMaker template, the main text column was 135mm wide, so this is a good value to use.

So, for example:
<fig>
<img align="right" width="135mm" placement="break" href="architecture.svg"/>
</fig>