XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

XSL-FO Properties

The finished document shown in Figure 14-3 is quite spartan. It simply breaks the original XML document into a few separate paragraphs. After quite a lot of work, it still hasn’t reached the polish that was achieved much more simply with CSS (back in the last chapter in Example 13-2 and Figure 13-1). Adding the sparkle of different fonts, bold headlines, bulleted lists, and other desirable features requires setting the relevant properties on the individual formatting objects. These are set through optional attributes of the formatting object elements like fo:block. The good news is that most of the property names and semantics are exactly the same as they are for CSS. For example, to make the text in an fo:block element bold, add a font-weight attribute with the value bold, like this:

<fo:block font-weight="bold">Southern Corn Bread</fo:block>

The similarity with the equivalent CSS rule is obvious:

dish { font-weight: bold }

The property name is the same. The property value is the same. The meaning of the property is the same. Similarly, you can use all the font-weight keywords and values that you learned for CSS, like lighter and 100, 200, 300, 400, etc. Only the syntactic details of how the value bold is assigned to the property font-weight and how that property is then attached to the dish element has changed. When XSL-FO and CSS converge, they do so closely.

Many other properties come across from CSS by straight extrapolation. For instance, in Example 13-2 the ...