Category Archives: XSL-FO

Adapt Saxon-CE event model to XSL-FO?

Posted on by

Inasmuch as the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C is looking at how to get feedback from the XSL formatter and I’ve also been reading about how Saxon-CE handles user input, I’m now wondering whether the same sort of pattern could be adapted to handling feedback from the XSL formatter.  Saxon-CE does it through template rules that match the element that receives the event and are in a mode that reflects the type of event, and similarly an XSL formatter could trigger on exceptional events such as overflow occurring or even on mundane events such as completion of a page sequence, and the templates in the corresponding modes could match on either FOs in the FO tree or areas in the area tree. Continue reading →

generate-id() in xsl:attribute-set

Posted on by

Inasmuch as xsl:attribute-set is most often thought of for adding constant sets of XSL-FO properties, it’s easy to forget that, as it says in the XSLT 2.0 spec:

Evaluating the same attribute set more than once can produce different results, because although an attribute set does not have parameters, it may contain expressions or instructions whose value depends on the evaluation context. Continue reading →

Khmer pagination

Posted on by

Inasmuch as Khmer – more specifically, my lack of knowledge about how to best format Khmer – made up a slide in my “XSL-FO meets the Tower of Babel” talk at the MultilingualWeb workshop in Luxembourg last week, Richard Ishida directed me to his page about Khmer, from which I found Franklin Huffman’s “Cambodian System of Writing“, and in the 153-page book, I found half a page on page numbering and section numbering in Khmer. Continue reading →

XSL-FO Meetup at XML Prague 2012

Posted on by

Inasmuch as XML Prague 2012 includes “Pre-conference Friday“, the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group is looking to host a XSL-FO meetup before XML Prague on Friday, 10 February 2012. The format and content will depend on your feedback. Possible ideas include:

  • Update on the XSL-FO 2.0 work
  • ‘Ignite’ lightning talks on XSL-FO
  • XSL-FO tutorial

If you use Twitter, register your interest at the “XSL-FO meetup @ XML Prague 2012” page on Lanyrd.com, otherwise send me email.  If you have suggestions for the format or content, likewise add something to the Lanyrd page or send me email.

Page Regions in XSL-FO

Posted on by

Inasmuch as I used this new sequence of images in my recent XSLT and XSL-FO talk at XML Summer School 2011, here’s an outline of page regions in XSL-FO.

The fo:simple-page-master FO in XSL 1.1 defines the dimensions of a page. A document may have more than one fo:simple-page-master, and the same fo:simple-page-master may be used in multiple contexts. A fo:simple-page-master has up to five regions: fo:region-body, fo:region-start, fo:region-end, fo:region-start, and fo:region-end.  Only fo:region-body is required.  The adjacent figure shows one arrangement of the regions. Continue reading →

XML Summer School 2011 ends on high note

Posted on by

Inasmuch as my final “XSLT and XSL-FO toolbox of tips and tricks” session was well received, XML Summer School 2011 finished on a high note. My other sessions, “Developing and Testing in XSLT” with Jeni Tennison in the “XSLT/XQuery” track and a five-minute Ignite-format talk on EPUB, also went well, but it was that final talk in the “Publishing” track that got the most visible reactions. Continue reading →

I get a tick out of U

Posted on by

Inasmuch as I couldn’t get a ✓, tick, check, ✓, ✓, U+2713, CHECK MARK, call it what you will, into PDF on Ubuntu 8.04 with Antenna House V5, I had to find a font with it and tell the formatter where to find the font. Continue reading →