The XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) standard offers powerful properties for controlling the layout of printed documents. This tip shows you how to control the insertion of page breaks for better-looking documents. I'll present a standard method that works with commercial XSL-FO renderers, and a workaround so you can apply the same technique with the open source FOP.

In order to process an XSL stylesheet, a stylesheet processor accepts data in XML and an XSL stylesheet to define the presentation of that XML. But there are two parts of the presentation:

XSL-FO (XSL-Formatting Objects) enables enterprise applications to publish graphic-arts quality printed and electronic documents from any XML data store. In this sample chapter, the author of "Definitive XSL-FO," explains how to use Floats and Footnotes, which are used to render distinctive information that is supplemental to the information found in the main text.

One of the issues many users face when introduced to the production of print from XML is that of page layout. Without having the page layout right, its unlikely that much progress will be made. By way of introducing the W3C XSL Formatting Objects recommendation, I want to present a simplified approach that will enable a new user to gain a foothold with page layout.

XSL Formatting Objects is itself an XML-based markup language that lets you specify in great detail the pagination, layout, and styling information that will be applied to your content. The XSL FO markup is quite complex. It is also verbose; virtually the only practical way to produce an XSL FO file is to use XSLT to produce a source document. Finally, once you have this XSL FO file, you need some way to render it to an output medium. There are few tools available to do this final step. For these reasons, XML FO has not caught on as quickly as XSLT.

Need portable documents that, unlike most XML documents, include representation information? This article introduces XSL-FO (XML Stylesheet Language-Formatting Objects) and explains how it can come to the rescue. To demonstrate the advantage of using XSL-FO, the article includes an example implementation of a database reporting system that uses Java and XML code.

I'm pleased to be able to present extended excerpts from Ken Holman's well known and respected training materials on XSL-FO. For reasons of internal consistency, we have kept the section numbering from the original material -- this means that some sections will not be numbered contiguously.

A spate of recent product announcements regarding XSL-FO raised a number of questions in our minds: What is it? Which documents are a good fit for XSL-FO? Which aren’t? What skills do publishers need to use XSL-FO? An author of the XSL-FO spec, Stephen Deach of Adobe Systems, offers these answers.