upCast runs on any machine that provides a Java Virtual Machine supporting J2SE version 1.3 or higher. For its user interface, upCast relies on and requires Swing 1.1 or higher.
Memory requirements (RAM) depend heavily on document size and document structure. Typically, 8 to 12 times the RTF document raw size in memory is needed for succesful conversion. If the document has many style changes and/or embedded images, more memory will be required.
When embedding upCast into your own projects, make sure to specify a big enough maximum heap (256 at least, 512 MB recommended) for the Java VM running your application in order to avoid Out of memory errors.
We recommend the use of Sun's J2SE version 1.3.x that is available from Sun's Java home page at http://java.sun.com/products/. It includes by default a Swing implementation suitable for upCast.
For the time being, we cannot recommend using J2SE version 1.4.x releases for use with upCast due to a very unfortunate packaging of outdated XML tools containing several bugs in the JRE core runtime library rt.jar, which take precedence over the newer, bugfixed releases of these tools upCast comes standard with.
You need at least 10 MB of free space on your hard disk to install upCast.
Mac OS X comes standard with a J2SE version 1.3.1 environment and an optional install of J2SE version 1.4.x via Software Update™, so upCast will run without any further installations required.
upCast is pre-configured to use the J2SE version 1.3.1 release when using the provided application wrapper so that it does not suffer from the XSLT processor issue mentioned above.
When downloading the double-clickable JAR version only, Mac OS X prefers the J2SE version 1.4.1 if installed. This leads to the same problems as mentioned for the Windows release of JRE 1.4.1: For the time being, we cannot recommend using J2SE version 1.4.x releases for use with upCast due to a very unfortunate packaging of outdated XML tools containing several bugs in the JRE core runtime library rt.jar, which take precedence over the newer, bugfixed releases of these tools upCast comes standard with.
You need at least 10 MB of free space on your hard disk to install upCast.
We recommend the use of Sun's J2SE version 1.3 or higher up to J2SE version 1.3.x. For details have a look at the windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP section earlier.
Up to and including J2SE version 1.3.x, upCast Library requires a GDI or X11 server running. This is true even when you include the library into a faceless server application. You may consider to have a virtual X11 server running.
Starting with J2SE 1.4, you may run upCast without having to run an X11 server. To start any application using upCast as a library and interfacing with it via the documented API, start the specific application in so-called headless mode by adding the -Djava.awt.headless=true parameter to the java startup commandline parameters.