Using the Ibex Command Line

John Farrow, Visual Programming Limited

This technical note describes how to use the Ibex command line tool.

Executables

Ibex ships with .Net assemblies for each version of .Net. These can be found in the directory in which Ibex was installed. The executables are:

.Net Framework	Executable
1.0	ibex10.exe
1.1	ibex11.exe
2.0	ibex20.exe
3.5	ibex35.exe
4.0	ibex40.exe

Defaults

If an FO file is used (as opposed to an XML and XSL file) and no file extension is specified a default extension of ".fo" will be added to the input file name and a default extension of ".pdf" will be used to create the output file.

This means these two commands are equivalent:

ibex40 test.fo test.pdf

ibex40 test

Options

Option	Example	Description
-base-uri-xml uri	ibex40 -base-uri-xml c:\work test	specifies the base URI used when retrieving XML files and images. This defaults to the location from which the XML or FO file is loaded
-base-uri-xsl uri	ibex40 -base-uri-xsl c:\work test	specifies the base URI used when retrieving XSL files. This defaults to the location from which the XSL file is loaded
-fonts [pattern]	ibex40 -number arial > fonts.fo	an FO file which lists fonts with names matching the specified pattern (or all fonts if no patten is specified) is written to the standard output. This FO can the be used to create a PDF showing the correct usage of each font. This is useful for finding the correct usage when fonts have multi-word names.
-level value	ibex40 -level info test	specifies the logging level and must be one of "info", "warning" or "severe"
-logfile name	ibex40 -logfile log.txt test	specifies the name of a file in which Ibex will log messages
-number n	ibex40 -number 3 test	the creation of the PDF will be repeated the specified number of times. This is useful when looking at performance as it minimises the overhead of initialising the .Net framework.
-pdf-version	ibex40 -pdf-version 1.3 test	forces the PDF version defined at the start of the PDF file to be the specified value. The default is "1.4"
-pdfx-version	ibex40 -pdfx-version "PDF/X-3:2003" test	when creating a PDF/X file this can be used to override the default value of "PDF/X-3:2003"
-tiff-as-jpeg	ibex40 -tiff-as-jpeg test	TIFF format is not natively supported in PDF files, so a TIFF image will normally be converted to PNG before being inserted into the PDF file. This option can be specified to have the TIFF converted to JPEG format rather than PNG.
-transform	ibex40 -transform test.xml test.xsl test.fo ibex40 -transform test.xml test.xsl test.fo "age=20"	this will create an FO file so you can see the results of the XLST transform. No PDF is generated. The second form shown demonstrates how to pass parameters to the XSLT transformation.
-webtimeout value	ibex40 -webtimeout 3000 test	this will change the timeout used when retrieving an image file from an HTTP or HTTPS server. The value specified is in milliseconds. The default value is 1300ms.
-xsl name	ibex40 -xsl test.xsl test.xml output.pdf	specifies the name of the XSLT stylesheet to be used to transform the XML file into FO