XSL-FO

Chapter 5. Blocks

Blocks represent smaller parts of a document, familiar as features such as paragraphs, lists, and tables. Using these pieces, you can structure your documents and present them within the page contexts you’ve established.

Block Basics

Think of the last document you styled. Each major space-separated block of contiguous text, graphic, table, or list is most likely to be a block when styled with XSL-FO. fo:block could be called the basic building block of page content. Simply inserting content into an fo:block element produces a simple paragraph style with all the default properties. Blocks are most commonly used within the page layout you have specified, specifically within the fo:flow element.

To appreciate the flexibility of blocks, it’s necessary first to select the right type of block, then to select from its list of available properties.

The top-level blocks include:

• fo:block

• fo:block-container

• fo:list

• fo:table

These are the major divisions, each producing an area within the block-progression-direction, visually separated by a new line. I’ll cover each of these in turn.

The Basic Block

The content model for a block consists of other blocks, inlines, or textual content. The simple block, acting as a paragraph, is likely to be your most used element in the fo namespace, for normal text-heavy documents. Note that the same fo:block may be used for any content that requires whitespace separation in the block-progression-direction. This ranges from the title of a document ...