Those XML cognoscenti who've been following the XML Stylesheet Language, or XSL, for any length of time already know that there are two flavors of style for XML documents:

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, designed to be used by both XSLT and XPointer.

This Python utility dumps the character contents of a supplied file assuming a particular character encoding for the bytes in the file. Each character in the file is displayed in a large font, with the corresponding hexadecimal Unicode character code point displayed below.

RenderX offers the most productive set of software tools available for high-quality print output of business content. Either as turnkey software or as an integral part of other business applications, RenderX software is used to merge database content into business reports such as invoices, statements, forms and applications; high performance dynamic document publishing for business documents like prospectuses, mortgages, titles, legal proceedings, letters and other corporate correspondence, and; typeset-quality publishing of XML-based content into legislation, technical documents, product manuals and books. With hundreds of worldwide customers, from the Global 1000 to smaller organizations, RenderX software is used within virtually every business segment. If you have content and you need it in print or a page representation, RenderX has the right product for your needs.

XSL-FO addresses some significant capabilities not included in existing Web standards:

Jirka Jirat has announced the addition of an XSL-FO and SVG examples repository to the Zvon developer reference site.

Dynamic publishing has long been a vital part of the Web environment. On news, e-commerce, and business Web sites, personalized information is easily combined with style sheets based on technologies like HTML and CSS to produce targeted Web sites. However, HTML and CSS have limited page layout capabilities for richly formatted documents, such as those intended for print or Adobe® PDF. Printed documents use a different set of publishing conventions including footnotes, sidebars, tables, cross-references, page numbers, graphics and images, and features such as page break controls and kerning.

The answer to the first question is easy. XSL-FO stands for eXtensible Stylesheet Language formatting objects. It’s a language for completely describing a styled document. The second question is not so easy, but we can oversimplify by saying that layout- and design-intensive publications are probably not good candidates for the XSL-FO approach. Content-driven documents fit the model much better, especially if they must be personalized, produced in high volume or generated in response to Web queries. If you want more depth than that, turn to this tutorial by one of the authors of the W3C specification.

A communiqué from Eduardo Gutentag describes the release of the Sun xmlroff XSL formatter as a SourceForge project. The xmlroff XSL Formatter "is written in C and currently produces PDF output using the PDFlib library. It uses libxml2 and libxslt plus the GLib, GObject and Pango libraries that underlie GTK+ and GNOME, although it does not require either GTK+ or GNOME.

Advent 3B2, a leading supplier of standards-based publishing software, is announcing a new, quality-oriented, Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Object (XSL-FO) rendering engine called 3B2-FO here at Seybold San Francisco 2003.

XSL-FO processors are really typesetting engines. An XSL-FO file is a mixture of text from your XML source document and XSL-FO tags that suggest how the text should be formatted. It is the XSL-FO processor that actually creates the typeset lines of text and lays them out on pages. An XSL-FO processor typically generates a PDF or PostScript file which can be fed to a printer to produce hardcopy output.

XSL-FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects) is a non-procedural language for formatting XML documents for page presentation. As either a stand-alone class or 1-day add-on to the XSLT/XPath class, this course introduces the principles and practice of using formatting objects.

The W3C has created a mailing list for the discussion of XSL formatting objects.

The XSL-FO 1.0 Recommendation http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/ is now over a year old and it is exciting to see a number of commercial implementations and open source or free projects available for the Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects. XSL-FO is used extensively on a daily basis at Crane Softwrights Ltd. for quality print-oriented results in many areas.

A common use case for Krysalis Barcode is generating barcodes in SVG format for XSL-FO documents. There are two main possibilities for generating barcode in an XSL-FO environment using Krysalis Barcode.

This technical note describes the technical details behind Arbortext’s support for XSL-FO, the new Web stylesheet standard for automatic publishing of XML to print and PDF. Arbortext has been involved in the development of the XML standards in general and the XSL standards specifically from the start of these initiatives.

In this section attributes with a description are explained in this tutorial.

Elements with a description are explained in this tutorial.

XSL-FO pages are filled with data from elements.

XSL-FO uses the <fo:table-and-caption> element to define tables. The XSL-FO table model is not very different from the HTML table model.