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Sams Teach Yourself XML in 21 Days

Sep 16, 2005

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Introducing XSL-FO

XSL-FO was created to let you extract the data in an XML document and format it visually as you want it to appear. This is different from yesterday's discussion, where the idea was to use the data in an XML document and simply create a new document.

To let you format individual sections of an output document, the W3C has defined formatting objects such as root and block that you use as elements (for example, <root> and <block>) that XSL-FO processors support. By using these elements, you can specify what parts of the output document you want to format. So that you can actually do the formatting, each object has built-in properties (for example, font-weight, line-height, border), which you use as attributes in the corresponding element.

When you use these predefined XSL-FO objects to identify what part of the document you want to format and use their properties to do the actual formatting, you can format your XML data visually. The formatted document can be a Microsoft Word document, a PDF document, or anything that supports the visual formatting you've created. Today you're going to create PDF documents and view them in the Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer.

Like XSLT and the other XML specifications from the W3C, XSL formatting objects have their own namespace, http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format. This namespace is usually given the prefix fo:, for formatting objects, not the xsl: prefix you saw yesterday. The current version of XSL-FO is 1.0, and you can find the specification at http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl. The specification for XSL-FO is at http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice6.html, and the specification of the properties you can use with the XSL-FO objects is at http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice7.html. XSL-FO 1.1 is being discussed, as is XSL-FO 2.0, but nothing about them has appeared yet, not even a working draft.

Let's take a look at an example to see what you're working with here. In XSL-FO 1.0, there are 56 formatting objects and 177 properties that apply to those objects. Each of the XSL-FO objects has its own XML tag, and the properties it supports are attributes of that tag; in fact, many of these properties come from CSS2. You can specify how you want the formatting to look by using these objects and properties. For example, here's how you might format the text "XSL-FO Rocks!" in 18-point type in a block (recall that blocks are given their own line in the display):

<fo:block font-family="arial" line-height="24pt" font-size="18pt">
    XSL-FO Rocks!
</fo:block>

This example uses the <fo:block> element to create a block in the output document, where the font will be Arial, the height of each line will be 24 points, and the font size will be 18 points. When you run this example through an XSL-FO processor, the processor produces a PDF document or another type of document, using the formatting you've specified. Interest in XSL-FO has picked up lately, and a growing number of software packages support it. Here's a sampling:

Adobe Document Server 5.0 from Adobe Systems (http://www.adobe.com)
E3 from Arbortext (http://www.arbortext.com)
FOP from Apache (http://xml.apache.org/fop)
PassiveTeX from TEI (http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Software/passivetex)
XEP from RenderX (http://www.renderx.com)
XSL Formatter from AntennaHouse (http://www.antennahouse.com), which is a commercial product
XSL-FO Renderer from Advent (http://www.3b2.com)

As with the rest of this book, the best way to see what's going on with XSL-FO objects is by working through an example. The following section takes a look at an in-depth one.

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