XSL-FO Training

[Steve Ball]

Zveno, in association with the National Library of Australia, is
presenting
a two day, hands-on training course on XSL Formatting Objects on
2nd-3rd December 2004
in Canberra Australia. The course will be held at the National
Library.

Please contact Steve Ball, Zveno, (e-mail address removed) to register for
the course.

Course outline is as follows:

XSL Formatting Objects

XSL Formatting Objects
- XSL Concepts
* eXtensible Style Language
* XSL phases
* Using XSLT and XSL-FO
* Simple example
* About stylesheets
* Status
- XSLFO Concepts
* eXtensible Stylesheet Language
* Status
* XSL Processing
* Features
* Formatting
* Area tree
* Paging and scrolling
* Page layout model
* Area model
* Internationalisation
- XSLFO Details
* XSL namespace
* Basic Document
* Layout masters
* Pages
* Block level elements
* Tables
* Lists
* Inline level elements
* Display Properties
* Graphics
* Headers and Footers
- Colophon
* 100% pure XML presentation
* Design

---

Steve Ball | XSLT Standard Library | Training &
Seminars
Zveno Pty Ltd | Web Tcl Complete | XML XSL Schemas
http://www.zveno.com/ | TclXML TclDOM | Tcl, Web
Development
(e-mail address removed)
+---------------------------+---------------------
Ph. +61 2 6242 4099 | Mobile (0413) 594 462 | Fax +61 2 6242
4099

 

[Jan Roland Eriksson]

Zveno, in association with the National Library of Australia,
is presenting a two day, hands-on training course on
XSL Formatting Objects on 2nd-3rd December 2004...

And why would a training course on a "dead end idea" be required in the
first place?

 

[ExGuardianReader]

And why would a training course on a "dead end idea" be required in the
first place?

Interesting that it has become a dead end idea? I've used it a couple of
times to offer PDF output as an option.

Is there another open-source tool that will do a similar job?

 

[Jan Roland Eriksson]

Jan Roland Eriksson wrote:

Interesting that it has become a dead end idea?

Several years back when the XSL initiative started (in a hilarious state
of mind thinking that everything in this world should be X'ed and it
could only become better it did not take long before those with
sound insight in what markup is really about, realized that what was
really needed as a complement to the XML meta language was a fully
functional transformation language.

Of course we already had that situation in the SGML world with DSSSL as
a steady companion, so there could be no real harm in using the newly
defined XML meta language to set up a new transformation language.

Thus XSL-Transformation got worked on for real to yield a fully Turing
complete programming language that can, together with a suitable
processor of course, be used to produce just about any kind of output
from an original loose or fully semantically defined XML source.

But here it is, "the dead end" as I named it; XSL-FO does not define any
kind of semantic value to the content of its elements, at best it is a
"shortcut description" on how to pretty print a monotonous mass of
content with no additional info what so ever on what different pieces of
that content might represent.

I've used it a couple of times to offer PDF output as an option.

I take that to mean that you have used XSL-FO marked up content as data
input to some PDF generating processor, right?

XSL-FO in it self is not a processor and thus can not produce PDF docs,
for sure.

Is there another open-source tool that will do a similar job?

A Google search for the term "xml2pdf" gives some 25000+ hits.
I don't think that it is impossible to find an open source'd processor
among those hits that still do not require from you to start with XSL-FO
markup as its input.

 

[ExGuardianReader]

But here it is, "the dead end" as I named it; XSL-FO does not define any
kind of semantic value to the content of its elements, at best it is a
"shortcut description" on how to pretty print a monotonous mass of
content with no additional info what so ever on what different pieces of
that content might represent.

Yes, that's a necessary tool. Something to produce "pretty" output. Once
you get data on paper, it doesn't contain info about *what* the data is
in the way XML does. It's just a report! Unless you want all reports to
be done in XML, and humans to be able to parse it mentally just so that
they know what they're looking at!

I take that to mean that you have used XSL-FO marked up content as data
input to some PDF generating processor, right?

Well, I've used Jakarta FOP to process the FO content into PDF.

 

[Roland Eriksson]

Yes, that's a necessary tool. Something to produce "pretty" output.
Once you get data on paper, it doesn't contain info about *what*
the data is in the way XML does.

PDF's are not for paper presentation only;
PDF's can contain structural information about their content.