What Is XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects)

This section provides a brief introduction of the XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) technology.

XSL-FO: An XML based markup language that defines how the embedded information should be formatted for viewing or printing. XSL-FO is very similar to TeX, which was a very popular language 15 years ago for writing well formatted scientific documents.

Main features of XSL-FO:

1. XSL-FO is XML based. So an XSL-FO document is also an XML document.

2. XSL-FO documents requires to an XSL-FO processor to comile them into new output formats that are suitable for viewing or printing. Common XSL-FO output formats are text, PDF and PS files.

3. XSL-FO can be embedded inside XSL transformation stylesheet files. In this case, the content source XML file will be processed in 2 steps in order to get the viewing or printing output files:

The 2-step process can be viewed as in this diagram:

   Content source (XML format)
      |
      |   XSLT stylesheet with XSL-FO statements
      |      |
      |      v      
      |<- XSLT transforming 
      |
      v
   Content with XSL-FO statements (XML format)
      |
      |<- XSL-FO processing 
      |
      v
   Printing document (PDF format) 

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Ideas on Publishing Books using XML

 Overview of hyPub - A Simple XML Publishing Tool

 Writing Book Contents in XHTML Source Files

 Transforming Book Source Files with XSL Technology

 Designing Web Page Layouts with Tables

 Controlling Web Page Appearance with CSS

 Sharing HTML Codes with JavaScript Files

 Generating Web Pages with hyPub

Formatting Printable Documents with XSL-FO

What Is XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects)

 Example of XSL-FO Document - hello.fo

 Installing Apache FOP - XSL-FO Processor

 Formatting XSL-FO Files to Text Files Using FOP

 Formatting XSL-FO Files to PDF Files Using FOP

 Formatting XML Files to PDF Files with XSLT

 Tranforming XML Files with XSLT Stylesheets

 Generating PDF Documents with hyPub

 Areas of Future Improvements

 References

 Full Version in PDF/ePUB