Processors

Nikolai Grigoriev

> I'm trying to learn the syntax of the <xsl:fo-block-container ..>

XSL FO inhabit another namespace, different from XSLT, and
are processed with different tools. Instead of XSLT
processors, look for XSL FO formatters/renderers. Some
examples are:

	FOP  
	FO2PDF:   
	Passive TeX: 
	CUEXsl: 

Most of them are work in progress however; there's still no
complete and fully conformant implementation.


http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format

As for examples, I dare suggest our collection of testcases
at http://www.RenderX.com/testcases.html. It refers to an
outdated version of XSL FO (1999-04-21) but still gives an
idea of what you can do with formatting objects ;-).

Arved Sandstrom

(Dated August 2000) FOP 0.14.0 has just been released. This release introduces important new functionality, some of which is described below.

We are well on the way to releasing a FOP 1.0 late this year which has full Extended Conformance with the XSL FO spec.

Regards, Arved Sandstrom FOP Release Coordinator

Items worked on since 0.13.0 release:

Michael Day

As an alternative to XSL-FO based formatting tools, we have released a tool for printing XML+CSS directly to PDF and PostScript. YesLogic releases Prince 1.0

Prince is a batch formatter for converting XML documents to printable PDF and PostScript by applying CSS stylesheets.

Prince prints any XML document with special support for XHTML and SVG, which can both be used in combination with other XML languages.

Prince supports a subset of the CSS2 properties for Fonts, Text, the Box Model, Tables and Paged Media, plus most of the CSS3 Selectors.

I invite you to try the demo version available on our website for both Windows and Linux at http://yeslogic.com/prince, and would love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Robin Cover

So, xmlroff is available at SourceForge now. See: my pages also, sourceforge and Its homepage

xmlroff is an XSL formatter. That is, it creates formatted output -- pages containing text in a variety of type styles and sizes -- from an input XML document and an XSL stylesheet. This processing model is defined in the XSL Recommendation [XSL] that was developed by the W3C.

xmlroff is written in C, and uses it uses libxml2 and libxslt plus the GLib, GObject and Pango libraries that underlie GTK+ and GNOME (although it does not require either GTK+ or GNOME). GLib is a general-purpose utility library, GObject is a flexible extensible object-oriented framework for C, and Pango is a framework for the layout and rendering of internationalized text. This combination made it easier to develop the formatter, makes it easier for current GTK+ and GNOME developers to also work on the formatter, and allows the formatter to use the internationalization support of Pango.

xmlroff currently produces PDF output using the PDFlib library. Other output formats can be added.

xmlroff is a command line program, but the bulk of the XSL formatting is implemented as a 'libfo' library that can be linked with any program that requires XSL formatting capability.