Special Edition Using XSLT

Integrating XSLT and XSL-FO

Of course, XSL-FO is a part of the XSL Recommendation, and as such, you shouldn’t think of it as being entirely separate from other extremely useful aspects of XSL and XSLT. In fact, one of the most powerful applications of XSL-FO involves building the XSL-FO sheets dynamically using XSL Transformations.

In the examples you have seen so far in this chapter, you have inserted data to be formatted directly into the stylesheet itself. However, separating content from display is one of the points of a structured markup language such as XML. One way in which you can use an XSL-FO stylesheet while still having your data separately in an XML file is through XSLT.

For example, let’s say you had a very simple table, which ...