This is a blog related to XSL-FO (and variants such as XSLFO, XSL/FO, XSLT/FO, FO and sometimes XMLFO 🙂 technologies.
I have 10+ years experience with working with XSLFO and related technologies (XSLT, etc) and I want to share this knowledge with the world! That and personal opinions about where the software industry is moving to.
Comments are welcome!
Here is a short introduction to XSL-FO:
XSL-FO is a standard defined by W3C, the same organization that defines HTML. The latest version of the standard is 1.1 and it is published here: http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/
The difference between HTML and XSLFO is that HTML is designed for on-screen, while XSL-FO is designed for printing. Think of it as a language for describing very complex documents (like books, product catalogs, invoices, etc.).
I am currently using the Ecrion XSL-FO Editor/Designer to build invoices for the financial industry. Back in 2000 the only way you could build your document was using a text editor – I used the editor that came with Microsoft Visual Studio back then – but it was a huge waste of time. Not only that, but once you start building the templates it was very hard to maintain them. XSL is powerful, put it can become unmanageable due to complexity.
To be continued …
XSL-FO and XML to PDF Blog 