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.

Prerequisites

• Students must be fluent in XML and comfortable with XSLT, as the exercises involve a good deal of hand-writing the transformations that produce the XSL formatting documents. Course 516 is excellent preparation

Learning 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.

Timeline: 1 day.

Chapter 1. Getting Started

• Formatting XML
• XSLT and XSLFO
• Flow of Information
• Formatting Objects
• Properties

Chapter 2. Page Masters

• Pages and Areas
• The Page-Master Model
• Regions
• Writing Mode and Orientation
• The Page-Sequence Model
• Flows
• Page-Sequence Masters
• Properties and the Inheritance Model

Chapter 3. Formatting

• Flows
• Blocks and Layout Options
• Inlines and Layout Options
• Lists
• Tables
• Controlling Pagination

Chapter 4. Formatting

• Page Numbering
• Identifying Content
• Page-Number Citations
• Links
• Tables of Contents

Appendix A. Learning Resources

System Requirements