What Is XEP?

This section describes RenderX XEP, which is an XSL processor developed by RenderX that allows you to perform XSLT (XSL Transformations) and process XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) to paged output devices. RenderX does offer XEP Free Person edition.

What Is XEP? XEP is an XSL processor developed by RenderX that allows you to perform XSLT (XSL Transformations) and process XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) to paged output devices. Here is a short description from XEP user guide:

XEP is a library of Java classes that converts XML data to printable formats, such as PDF, PostScript, AFP, PPML. It can also produce SVG, XPS and XHTML files. XEP accepts either an XSL-FO file, or an XML file paired with an XSL stylesheet, as input. In the latter case, XEP uses an internal XSLT transformer to preprocess the XML file according to the XSL stylesheet, thereby converting it to an XSL-FO file. The XEP engine then processes the XSL-FO file.

The logical flow of document processing can be divided into three steps, as illustrated in the following figure:

RenderX XEP XSL-FO Processing Steps

The three steps are:

RenderX offers XEP Free Personal and Free Academic editions. See next tutorial on how to download and install XEP Free Personal edition.

Note that XEP supports XML 1.0 and XSL 1.1.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Introduction of XSL-FO

 Apache™ FOP (Formatting Objects Processor)

RenderX XEP as an XSL-FO Tool

What Is XEP?

 Downloading and Installing XEP

 RenderX XEP Example - Borders.fo

 Introduction of Area Model

 XSL-FO Document Basics and Examples

 Page Layout Masters

 Block-Level Formatting Objects

 Inline-Level Formatting Objects

 Including Graphics in XSL-FO document

 Table of Rows and Columns

 List, Item, Label, and Body

 Floating Blocks - "float" and "footnote"

 Hyperlinks, Table of Contents and Indexes

 Headers and Footers using "static-content"

 Font Attributes and Font Families

 Apache FOP Font Configurations

 RenderX XEP Font Configurations

 Converting HTML to PDF

 References

 Full Version in PDF/ePUB