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.

The refined formatting object tree describes one or more intended presentations of the information within this tree. Formatting is the process which converts the description into a presentation. See [3 Introduction to Formatting]. The presentation is represented, abstractly, by an area tree, as defined in the area model. See [4 Area Model]. Each possible presentation is represented by one or more area trees in which the information in the refined formatting object tree is positioned on a two and one-half dimensional surface.

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.