IBM's recently-released XSL Formatting Objects Composer (XFC) is "a typesetting and display engine that implements a substantial portion of XSL Formatting Objects (FO), which became a W3C Recommendation on October 15, 2001. XSL FO is an XML language for typesetting, printing, or displaying any of the world's written languages. XFC produces either an interactive onscreen display using Java2D or an output file using PDF.

XML documents will be transformed into XSL-FO (Formatting Objects) according to the rules described in the XSL stylesheet.

Apoc XSL-FO is the first commercially available XSL-FO document renderer for the Microsoft .NET platform. Apoc XSL-FO is a .NET component, written in 100% managed code, that renders XSL-FO XML documents directly to PDF.

This page presents a learn-by-example tutorial for XSL Formatting Objects. It is not an exhaustive reference on XSL FO, but rather an attempt to facilitate reading the XSL Formatting Objects specification by giving a series of commented basic examples.

The initial trait of this paragraph should be formatted using red 14 pt bold Helvetica font, while the rest of the text should be rendered in 12 pt normal black Times. The initial trait of this paragraph should be formatted using red 14 pt bold Helvetica font, while the rest of the text should be rendered in 12 pt normal black Times.

There are a number important concepts used in XSL-FO language:

When you are including graphic images in your documents, you need to manage the locations of the graphics files.It helps to know that the handling of graphics files is quite different for HTML and FO outputs.

The knowledge base section contains solutions, workarounds, and pertinent information for our product line. Here you will find answers to many frequently asked questions, implementation help and sample code.

Davisor Chart supports Portable Document Format (PDF) output through the use of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) eXtendable Stylesheet Language Formatted Objects (XSL-FO) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). The process to produce PDF documents out of XSL-FO data and SVG images is straighforward, but it requires some external software and some initial setup work. The following chapters tell what is needed, and how the process is set up.

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, designed to be used by both XSLT and XPointer. (W3C Recommendation 16 November 1999)

There are three basic font families built into all the tools: Times Roman, Helvetica, and Courier. These correspond to the serif, sans-serif, and monospace generic families, respectively, that FO processors recognize. You can specify these font names or generic names in stylesheet parameters such as body.font.family and they will just work. But what if your print design calls for other fonts, or you just want to try something a little different?

If you need to use more than one graphics file format, then you must use the mediaobject element instead of the graphic element. You could use profiling to select from among several graphic elements, but mediaobject is designed to do it without the need for the profiling step.

As XSL Formatter is a Unicode application, the languages can be formatted as far as there are suitable fonts installed on your PC. XSL Formatter now supports HAT, CJK. Find amazing potential for multilingual publications!

Extensible Markup Language, abbreviated XML, describes a class of data objects called XML documents and partially describes the behavior of computer programs which process them. XML is an application profile or restricted form of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language [ISO 8879].

This is a power point presentation about the introduction to XSL-FO.

FOP uses XSL-FO as input. It is the responsibility of the user to make sure that the XSL-FO submitted to FOP is correct. The tutorial items presented here are not comprehensive, but are of the FAQ variety. Another good FAQ is Dave Pawson's XSL FAQ.

For the most part this book is going to focus on XML documents used as input to and output from various kinds of programs. In many cases it’s entirely possible that the XML documents will be both written and read by software and that no human being ever even looks at the documents.

This describes a fully unattended batch methodology for producing "back of the book indexes" using XSL-FO 1.0 and a free tool available on the Web. We hope that other free tools can be identified for use in this process, and we will maintain this page with the list as they are found.

One of the main ideas of structured languages (SGML and XML) is to separate structure and content from presentation. XSL is the latest in a long sequence of both standardized and proprietary solutions to this problem. Like DSSSL, and unlike FOSI and CSS, XSL is a two step process model: transformation of the original document and formatting of the transformed document. [pdf]

XSL was orignally a single specification developed by the W3C which defined two major pieces of functionality. The first was a formatting language which allows the description of a series of printed pages and a detailed set of rules for how to assemble those pages. The formatting language can be loosely viewed as a superset of CSS2 with support for printed media.