518.  XSLFO

Rev. 1.0.2

 

This course is now available directly from our partner, Capstone Courseware.

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.

 

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.

 

Course Duration:  1 day

 

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.

 

1.      Getting Started

Formatting XML

XSLT and XSLFO

Flow of Information

Formatting Objects

Properties

 

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

 

3.      Formatting

Flows

Blocks and Layout Options

Inlines and Layout Options

Lists

Tables

Controlling Pagination

 

4.      Formatting

Page Numbering

Identifying Content

Page-Number Citations

Links

Tables of Contents

 

Learning Resources

 

System Requirements

 

Hardware – minimal:                     Pentium 500MHz, 256 meg RAM, 500 meg HD.

Hardware – recommended:           Pentium 1.5gHz, 512 meg RAM, 1 gig HD.

 

Operating system:                          Tested on Windows XP Professional.  The course software should be viable on all Windows or Linux systems which support a J2SE 1.4 SDK (if using FOP) or another compliant XSLFO processor.

 

Software:                                       All free downloadable tools.