XSL-FO

Chapter 2. A First Look at XSL-FO

This chapter introduces the details of XSL-FO, including a look at XSL-FO markup and an explanation of how to produce print documents with XSLT and XSL-FO. You should have a basic understanding of XSL-FO processing by the end of the chapter, which will provide a foundation for learning the rest of XSL-FO.

An XSL-FO Overview

This section provides a high level view of XSL-FO and its major parts, describes the process of getting from source to finished output, and describes some of the available tools. It introduces some of the necessary concepts (which will be expanded on later) and some of the jargon.

The production process starts with an XML document that you have been given or that you have created: the source XML. You take that document and apply an XSLT transformation (using an XSLT stylesheet) to select parts or all of the document content, and it produces an output XML document that uses the XSL-FO vocabulary. Let’s call this output document the XSL-FO stylesheet. The XSL-FO stylesheet formatting instructions describe how the content of the document should be laid out for presentation to the end user. The formatting engine interprets the XSL-FO stylesheet to produce formatted output, often PDF, T_EX, or some other print-ready form. This formatted document is then ready for use. This end-to-end process is shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. The end-to-end ...