The Apache FOP Project

The Apache™ Batik Project

Architecture overview

This document briefly describes the Batik architecture and the role of each of its modules. For detailed module design, you can refer to the Batik UML diagrams Object by Design or yWorks.

The Batik modules are of one of three types: application modules, core modules and low level modules. The following figure illustrates these three module types.

![Batik Architecture](images/HighLevelArchitecture.png "")

Application modules illustrate how to use the core modules and let users evaluate the Batik software by experimenting with its features.

The Core modules are the heart of Batik and the primary deliverables for the projects. These are the modules developers use to manipulate, generate, create, convert, render and view SVG content.

Finally, the Low level modules are used internally by the core modules to accomplish their work. These modules are not typically used by developers directly.

Application modules

As mentioned earlier, the application modules illustrate the functionality that Batik offers.

For example, the SVG browser is built using several Batik core modules (such as the JSVGCanvas GUI component and the ImageTranscoder s) and illustrates how Batik lets you not only view, zoom, pan and rotate SVG documents, but also search them and convert them to other formats (such as JPEG, TIFF or PNG).

The SVG pretty printer is another example that shows how Batik lets you manipulate and transform SVG content, here for the purposed of tidying up potentially disorganized SVG files.

The SVG font converter illustrates how Batik can help you embed SVG font definitions in an SVG file by providing an application that converts ranges of characters from a TrueType Font format to the SVG font format.

Finally, the SVG rasterizer shows how to leverage the transcoder API to convert to and from SVG content.

Note that even though the application modules are meant to be useful and fun to use, they are not the primary deliverables of the Batik project. Instead, they are illustrations of how the Batik core modules might be used and combined.

Core modules

The Batik core modules are the heart of the Batik architecture. They can be used individually or in combination for various purposes, and the application modules offer some usage examples.

Low level modules

The low level modules are not expected to be used directly by developers using the Batik API. Rather, they support the operation of the core modules. The low level modules include: