Xsl-Fo: Making XML Look Good in Print by Dave Pawson

Xsl-Fo: Making XML Look Good in Print Dave Pawson ebook
ISBN: 9780596003555
Page: 284
Format: pdf
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Incorporated

The XSL Formatting Objects (FO) document is input to a formatter, a composition tool that renders marks on paper, typically these days in the form of a PDF file. A lot of XML implementers assume that their DTP and of using CSS3 to format XML source? During volunteer work for a organization that needed a new website I discovered XSl-FO and for that matter XML. Companies like RenderX and Ecrion have very good GUI based tools for designing your printed pieces that can then ingest this datastream and create the necessary XSL:FO datastream that then can be rendered to PDF, You have to figure out how to use the resulting XML file in conjunction with one of the XSL:FO formatting tools. That's reuse in one sense, but is an open-source example. First look at XSL-FO: Here is a sample XSL-FO file. Moving on to a different level of sophistication brings in standards like DocBook, which have pre-written XSLT's which allow a single XML file to create HTML (of various layouts), Javahelp, XSL-FO (for processing into print), ePub and others. It is much better in handling and referencing print resources for example. On Wednesday, the Apache Foundation announced the release of Apache FOP 1.0, a project that has been a decade in the making. This is one consideration, but beyond functionality, execution method may be a more relevant first step in making a selection. If you are interested more in detail please take a look at w3school's site. If you want to transform XML from one format to another, and especially if either the input or output XML is complicated or the transformation itself is difficult or awkward to express, then XSL may be a good choice. They have pretty good contents not only this XSL-FO but any other XML related. Today we do support the import and use of XML formatted elements today (CSS, XSL, and can output XSL-FO) but we would not claim that to be a standard software function. It worked, the results look very good and the process was streamlined. We're quickly approaching the point (if we're not already there) at which, for some use cases, the print formatting capabilities of CSS are good enough to justify avoiding the complexity of XSL-FO. Producing quality printed output is devilishly hard. I propose that AFP is already a much better archive and portable document format than PDF/A. In this article I will make use of Apache FOP, which is part of Apache XML Graphics Project. There are parts that seem superfluous, however they are in fact mandatory (e.g. With desktop publishing (DTP) tools and help authoring tools (HATs), a moderately competent computer user can control the look and feel of the final output.