January 2002
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
11h 5m
English
Content preview from Special Edition Using XSLT
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Basics of XSL-FO
XSL layout control is based on Formatting Objects, which are rectangular areas similar to boxes in CSS. The rectangular boxes are not necessarily physically represented, but they are the mechanism that rendering engines use to lay out your pages based on XSL-FO. These areas have a number of properties, and they can contain other areas, images, text, and so on.
An easy way to look at this is to examine some of the objects used to represent tables:
fo:table
fo:table-column
fo:table-row
fo:table-cell
Each of these XSL-FO elements represents a different object, some of which contain other objects, such as fo:table, which can contain table-column, table-row, and table-cell objects. Those objects in turn contain objects (rows and columns ...