XSL-FO and XSLT can help each other.

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]

This section describes how to install and use the two free XSL-FO processors, FOP and PassiveTeX.

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.

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:

XSL-FO is a page description language. It's a language specifically designed for working with fairly sophisticated page content; consequently, it can be surprisingly difficult to master well.

Need help converting HTML documents to PDF? This reference guide shows by example how to use XSLT templates to convert 45 commonly used HTML elements to formatting objects (from the XSL-FO vocabulary) for easy transformation to PDF using XSLT. The examples assume that you're using the Java-based XSLT processor Xalan and the Apache XML Project's FOP tool, but most of the methods would work just as well with other tools.

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

"block": An XSL-FO element serving as an action statement to generate one block area by working through the enclosed content.

In this article, you'll learn about XSL-FO and an example to convert XML into a PDF document. This article assumes that you have some familiarity with XML and XSLT.

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.

This article gives an overview of XSL-FO software the renders XSL-FO files to PDF. At this moment there are a number of companies:

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 (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.

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.