XSLFO Workshop

This course introduces the eXtensible Stylesheet Language, or XSL — also known as XSL with Formatting Objects or XSLFO, to distinguish it clearly from XSLT.  XSLFO provides the ultimate, standards-based solution to producing print and other presentation documents from XML information.  This course teaches XSL with a focus on producing PDFs, using Apache FOP as the formatting engine.  Though XSL is quite a dense technology, this one-day course provides a solid grounding in the basic techniques, and students will leave the course ready to tackle simple to moderately complex formatting tasks.

Objectives

• Describe the relationship between XSLT and XSLFO, and their roles in the typical XML-to-print production process.
• Understand the formatting objects model, including the concepts of page, area, block, and line.
• Build page masters and master sets to define common page layouts and area models.
• Build page sequences to produce body, header and footer content.
• Format content using blocks, inlines, lists and tables.
• Take explicit control of document pagination.
• Apply properties to formatting objects and use XSLFO’s property-inheritance model effectively.
• Build tables of contents and embed hyperlinks into documents