From Book News, Inc.
Providing guidance on using the entire XSL-FO specification, this manual begins with basic concepts and moves on to specific topics, including: tables, footnotes, borders and backgrounds, expressions, objects, and properties. Numerous examples illustrate key concepts and important techniques. Holman is a program developer.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Book Description
The definitive guide to state-of-the-art XML publishing with XSL-FO! XSL-FO (XSL-Formatting Objects) enables enterprise applications to publish graphic-arts quality printed and electronic documents from any XML data store, no matter how large or complex. In Definitive XSL-FO, one of the world’s leading XML experts shows how XSL-FO is revolutionizing document publishing. The book offers concise, authoritative, example-rich guidance on using the entire XSL-FO specification, including: XSL-FO’s objectives, semantics, and vocabulary Key concepts, including layout-based versus content-based formatting, and formatting versus rendering Area and page fundamentals: area models, block and inline basics, containers, page definition, and sequencing Generic body constructs and tables Static content and page geometry sequencing Footnotes, floats, breaks, keeps, spacing, borders, and backgrounds Interactive objects for dynamic displays Supplemental publishing objects, including bidirectional Unicode scripts Using XSLT with XSL-FO Includes powerful quick reference tables for XSL-FO expressions, objects, and properties Part of The Charles F. Goldfarb Definitive XML Series™
From the Back Cover
“Holman is my main source of information on XSL-FO … a life saver on projects where we print XML information.” —W. Eliot Kimber, ISOGEN International Format, paginate, and publish your XML data with full graphic-arts quality! Comprehensive: Covers every formatting object in the W3C® XSL-FO Recommendation Proven: Based on fully tested materials used in public seminars and corporate training programs throughout the world Concise: Bullet-point, bite-size presentation helps you master XSL-FO fast! Authoritative: From the founder of the OASIS XML and XSLT conformance committees “For centuries, humanity has accessed information with proven page-oriented navigational tools and sophisticated formatting. Just printing Web pages won’t do this job for your data—you need the power of XSL-FO. Join the thousands who have learned how from Ken Holman.” —Charles F. Goldfarb The definitive guide to state-of-the-art XML publishing with XSL-FO! XSL-FO (XSL-Formatting Objects) enables enterprise applications to publish graphic-arts quality printed and electronic documents from any XML data store, no matter how large or complex. In Definitive XSL-FO, one of the world’s leading XML experts shows how XSL-FO is revolutionizing document publishing. The book offers concise, authoritative, example-rich guidance on using the entire XSL-FO specification, including: XSL-FO’s objectives, semantics, and vocabulary Key concepts, including layout-based versus content-based formatting, and formatting versus rendering Area and page fundamentals: area models, block and inline basics, containers, page definition, and sequencing Generic body constructs and tables Static content and page geometry sequencing Footnotes, floats, breaks, keeps, spacing, borders, and backgrounds Interactive objects for dynamic displays Supplemental publishing objects, including bidirectional Unicode scripts Using XSLT with XSL-FO Includes powerful quick reference tables for XSL-FO expressions, objects, and properties Part of The Charles F. Goldfarb Definitive XML Series™
About the Author
G. KEN HOLMAN is Chief Technology Officer for Crane Softwrights Ltd. and Canadian chair of the ISO SGML standards group. Ken is an invited expert to the W3C®, a member of the W3C Working Group that developed XML, and founder of the OASIS Technical Committees for XML and XSLT conformance. His many books on XML technologies include Definitive XSLT and XPath.About the Series EditorCHARLES F. GOLDFARB is the father of XML technology. He invented SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language on which both XML and HTML are based. You can find him on the Web at www.xmlbooks.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
We often take the printed form of information for granted.
Yet how many of us are satisfied with the printing functionality of a web browser? How often have you found the paginated result of printing a lengthy web document as easy to navigate as the electronic original?
Navigating a paginated document is very different from navigating a web page, and browser-based navigation mechanisms, understandably, will not work on printed output. How would we follow a printed hyperlink when the visible clickable content hides the underlying hyperlink target address?
When we produce a paginated presentation of our XML information, we necessarily must offer to the consumers of our documents a set of navigation tools different from those available on our web pages. These navigational aids have been honed since bound books have been used: headers, footers, page numbers, and page number citations are some of the constructs we use to find our way around a collection of fixed-sized folios of information.
Layout and typesetting controls give us the power to express our information on pages in a visually pleasing and perhaps meaningful way using a set of familiar typesetting conventions. Vendors of printing and publishing software have offered proprietary solutions implementing their choices of controls and aspects of layout using their semantics for paginated production. We may have been reluctant to use these proprietary tools for fear of locking ourselves into a technology not supported, or not supported well, by any other application.Layout standards
Many aspects of layout are, in fact, adopted in the Web community; they are applicable for electronic displays and described in Recommendations such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This Recommendation defines presentation semantics in areas such as font, margin, and color properties. Paginating marked up information is also not something new. The Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL), the international standard on which XSL-FO is based, was used originally with SGML documents and therefore works unchanged with XML documents.
Accepting that HTML and CSS are suitable and sufficient for browser-oriented rendering of information, the W3C set out to define a collection of pagination semantics for print-oriented rendering. Along with paper results, these pagination semantics are equally suitable for an electronic display of fixed-size folios of information, e.g. in page-turner browsers or Portable Document Format (PDF) readers.
The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), also known colloquially in our community as the Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), combines the heritage of CSS and DSSSL in a well-thoughtout and robust specification of formatting semantics for paginating information.
The Recommendation itself is a rigorous, lengthy, and involved technical specification of the processes and operations performed by a formatting engine to effect paginated results consistent with other formatting engines acting on the same inputs. Well-written for its intended purpose and useful as a reference, the document remains out of reach for many people who just want to write XSL-FO stylesheets and print their marked-up information.About this book
Definitive XSL-FO is written for the beginning XSL-FO stylesheet writer, not the XSL-FO engine implementer.
Background and overview information sets the stage for the stylesheet writer to comprehend why this XML vocabulary exists. Important terminology is explained and the names of key concepts are highlighted. The components of the vocabulary are grouped in discussions focused on functional areas. Examples illustrate each of the formatting objects.
It covers all the formatting objects of XSL-FO and summarizes their properties. This book assumes no prior knowledge of XSL-FO.
Simple things can be done simply in XSL-FO. The objective of this book is to help you get started producing high-quality layouts quickly. For esoteric requirements, the complete text of the XSL 1.0 Recommendation in all of its agonizing (but necessary) detail is required, so it is referenced section by section from the body of this book. Thus the reader with special requirements can delve into the nuance and finely-grained functionality not needed by most users.
Note that neither the Recommendation itself nor this book attempt to teach facets of typography and attractive or appropriate layout style, but only the formatting semantics, the implementation of those semantics, and the nuances of control available to the stylesheet writer and implemented by a stylesheet formatting tool. XSL-FO is a very powerful language with which we can possibly create very ugly or very beautiful pages from our XML-based information.Typographical and navigation conventions
This book adopts a number of typographical conventions to assist in the navigation of the content. Section references to the Recommendation are in italics and parentheses, e.g.: (6.10.2). At times, Recommendation section references are paired with a page number from this book, e.g.: (7.18.1; 368).Construct references are typeset as follows: Formatting objects and properties are in monospaced font (e.g.: basic-link, baseline-shift); Data types are in monospaced slanted font face (e.g.: angle); URL references are in monospaced font (e.g.: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/xslspec.html).
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