How-To: Diagnosing DOCX Templates with the CLI Tooling
You have a DOCX template. You run the stamper. You get either a blank output, a cryptic stack trace, or — worst of all — a silently wrong document. · Read more...
Latest posts
The Solo Maintainer's Toolbelt: Craftsmanship as a Shield Against Decay
Maintaining an active ecosystem of open-source projects is a challenge, but doing so while holding a full-time position in a regulated industry—where the day-to-day topics are mostly unrelated—requires a specific kind of discipline. Currently, I oversee several projects: office-stamper, the... · Read more...
Debugging $date in a Maven Skin: Old‑School Techniques Over Guesswork
Every project has that one quiet corner where something almost works. For me, it was the footer of my projects site’s Maven skin: the copyright year was hardcoded, and every time I tried to make it dynamic with $date, nothing... · Read more...
How‑to — ExcelContext: Expose Excel Structure to SpEL (Sheets, Cells, Tables)
This guide shows how to expose an .xlsx workbook to your templates through ExcelContext, so SpEL can query sheets, individual cells by A1 address, each sheet’s default table (header row + records), and named tables by name. · Read more...
Monthly Topic — Expression Safety Patterns with Spring SpEL
In March, I pivoted office‑stamper back to Spring SpEL to unlock predictable nested contexts and fix long‑standing sharp edges. In April, we delivered SVG stamping. In May, I’m focusing on safety: how to let expressions power your templates without opening... · Read more...
How‑to — Windows Packaging for the Office‑stamper CLI (jpackage: Portable EXE + Installer)
Long‑term goal: provide a friendly command‑line that can batch‑generate documents from business‑friendly sources — Word/PowerPoint/Excel templates with data from CSV/JSON. This post documents the Windows packaging path with jpackage, plus a short note on native executable experiments. · Read more...
Monthly Commit — Unifying the Image Pipeline (SVG/EMF/WMF via ImageIO)
In April, I shipped v3.3 with SVG stamping as the headline feature. This month’s commit goes deeper: I unified how office‑stamper handles images—raster and vector—by moving to a modern ImageIO‑based pipeline with custom plugins. · Read more...
Office-stamper v3.3 — Vector Graphics and SVG Stamping
Following our pivot back to Spring SpEL in v3.2, version 3.3 of office-stamper addresses a request that has been on my radar for a long time: high-fidelity vector image stamping. · Read more...
Back to Spring SpEL ExpressionParser
When I released office-stamper v3.0 back in January, I introduced the possibility of using a fully custom ExpressionParser. The goal was to give users complete control over how placeholders were evaluated. However, less than three months later, I am retiring... · Read more...
Feedback Loops and the AsciiDoc Pivot
Following the stabilization of the public surface in version 3.1, my focus for January turned toward the “engine of the engine.” As a solo maintainer, I don’t have a team to review my PRs or catch my blind spots. To... · Read more...