 | Level: Intermediate Doug Tidwell (dtidwell@us.ibm.com), developerWorks Cyber Evangelist, IBM
11 Feb 2003 This intermediate-level tutorial shows advanced techniques for working with XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) for formatting data, such as handling lists and tables, creating complex documents with multiple layouts, adding repeating elements, and converting HTML elements to formatting objects and thence to PDF documents. Examples include XSLT templates, FO samples, and PDF output files, all processed in Java with the Apache XML Project's Xalan XSLT processor and FOP (Formatting Objects to PDF) tool.
Prerequisites
Although you can use other XSL-FO rendering engines, this tutorial is written for the Apache XML Project's FOP (Formatting Objects to PDF) translator. The examples in this tutorial work with FOP Version 0.20.4, which was released on July 5, 2002. If you try them with other versions of FOP, they may or may not work. The XSL-FO spec became an official recommendation of the W3C on 15 October 2001. The FOP tool supports most of the final spec. The first tutorial in this series is:
System requirements
To go through the exercises in this tutorial, you'll need a Java Developer's Kit (JDK) Version 1.3 or later, as well as the FOP package from the Apache XML Project. You can find the FOP package at xml.apache.org/dist/fop. Download the latest version and unzip it. Once you have the JDK and FOP installed, you need to set the classpath.
Duration
Under two hours
Formats html, pdf
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