In the beginning, there was the page. And the page was without objects and void, and not a whole lot was upon the face of the page.

And XSL said, let there be text, and there was text.

And XSL saw the text, and they divided the text from the page. And XSL called the text the region-body, and the space they called the margins. And the region-body and the margins were the first formatting.

And XSL said, let there be blocks in the midst of the text, and let them divide the text from the text. And it was so. And the text with blocks was the second formatting.

And XSL said, let there be regions in the edges of the page to hold static content, and let them be for page numbers and running heads, and it was so.

And XSL made the two page sides, the recto for the right hand side and the verso for the left.

And XSL set them in the page masters to apply to all pages. And the recto and the verso were the third formatting.

And XSL said, let the blocks bring forth abundantly inline objects and properties that apply to them.

And XSL created fo:character and every inline FO after their kind, and every property after its kind, and it was good.

And the inline FOs and properties were the fourth formatting.

And XSL said, let users make graphics, and tables, and columns, and side floats and other areas. And the graphics and tables and columns and side floats were the fifth formatting.

Then XSL did errata until XSL 1.1, which added change bars, table markers, indexing FOs and much that was good.

Future development is happening on the Trac and Subversion for the xslide SourceForge project.  See https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/xslide/wiki/WikiStart.

Dave Pawson is the editor of the new Working Draft, though everybody on the Working Group contributed both to the new FOs and properties and to the editing.

There are still more FOs and properties from the “Design Notes” to be included in the next version, plus I would expect more new FOs and properties to be defined between now and then. In the meantime, it’s still possible to raise or comment on issues in the W3C Bugzilla to do with the current WD, the previous “Design Notes”, the XSL-FO 2.0 Requirements, or even errata for XSL 1.1. See http://www.w3.org/XML/2008/xsl-fo-bugzilla.html for instructions on using Bugzilla to report XSL-FO issues.

This WD is also the first publication from the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group that was chartered earlier this year to take over the work of the XSL Formatting Objects Sub-Group of the XSL Working Group.

FOP_OPTS="-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=9000,server=y,suspend=y" fop test.fo test.pdf

Non-rectangular areas and copyfitting may seem like radical new steps for XSL FO, but they are both in the first XSL Requirements Summary published in 1998! One thing that has changed since 1998 is that now XSL can say “area shapes will be SVG”, and everybody will nod wisely and get on with implementing or using non-rectangular areas expressed in SVG. Back in 1998, there was no SVG and no other standard way of expressing shapes that could have been nearly as usable for the purposes of XSL FO.

The talks are:

• What XSL 2.0 means for implementers and users — Discusses the changes that will have to take place under the hood of any XSL formatter that supports XSL 2.0 and what those additional capabilities can bring to your stylesheets.
• Real time, all the time, ragtime XML — An update on the capabilities of Xcruciate.

• Go to http://www.jisc.go.jp/app/JPS/JPSO0020.html, enter “X4051″ in the first text input field (the one with the “JIS” prefix), then press enter.
• On the next page, select “JISX4051″.
• On the following page, there’ll be links to the PDFs of the parts of JIS X 4051. You can view them in your browser, but you can’t print them.  (If your browser launches in an external application to view PDFs,  all you might see is a bunch of blank pages.)

The XSL FO 2.0 talk covers: a quick overview of XSL 1.1 (by building up a formatted page in the manner of Genesis 1); the current uses for XSL; the W3C XSL FO subgroup; the XSL 2.0 requirements workshop and requirements document; and some examples of what will be possible with XSL 2.0.

The “Testing XSLT” talk from XML Prague 2009 covers more of the “what” and “why” of testing XSLT that previous renditions of the talk or tutorial. It consequently has fewer details about individual tools, but for that there’s now resource pages for XSLT and XSL FO tools on the Menteith Consulting website.

The other XML Prague 2009 talk is about Xcruciate, where I was the second speaker with Mark Howe of Cyberporte, and the posters were about XSL FO 2.0 requirements and using XSLT with xmlroff to generate C source code and other things.

So I would like to know how you are using XSL FO. Please reply to Tony.Graham@MenteithConsulting.com.

To make it a bit easier for you, here are some categories:

• Use
• Volume (e.g., pages per day/week/month/year/job)
• When you started using XSL FO
• Interesting aspects of job/output
• Additional comments
• Anonymous (yes/no)

I am interested in all uses of XSL FO, but if your use is particularly off-the-wall, I may come back to you asking for a sample or a scan/photo of the completed work.

I will summarise the results back to here and to the lists where I’m also asking for information.

If you want to be anonymous, I won’t mention either you or your company by name in any results.

Some version of the results may end up being linked to from the W3C XSL page: I haven’t organised anything with the XSL FO SG, but it seems like the sort of information that would be useful to have there.

Firefox could display the character, so I knew it had to be there somewhere. After a bit of hunting through /usr/share/fonts using FontForge, I found the OpenSymbol font, originally part of OpenOffice but now separately installable as the ttf-opensymbol package.

The first step in acquainting any XSL formatter with the font’s use is including the font name in a font-family value. Specifying font-family on fo:root sets the default for the document:

<fo:root font-family="Georgia, opensymbol"
 font-selection-strategy="character-by-character">

I used to have symbol, etc., in that list for use on Windows, but, sadly, I haven’t found a way to get a ✓ into PDF other than also installing the OpenSymbol font there. Specifying font-selection-strategy as character-by-character is just making sure the formatter will swap fonts if the first font doesn’t have a glyph.

How the XSL formatter finds the font is different for different formatters. The second, Antenna House-specific step is adding /usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice, which contains the font file, to the config file at /usr/AHFormatterV5/etc/font-config.xml:

<font-config>
 <!--otf-metrics-mode mode="typographic"/-->
 <!-- add your font folder here -->
 <!-- font-folder path="/home/user-name/fonts" -->
 <!-- /font-folder -->
 <font-folder path="/usr/AHFormatterV5_64/fonts">
 <glyph-list file="ZapfDingbats-glyphname.txt" afm="ZapfDingbats.afm"/>
 </font-folder>
 <font-folder path="/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts"/>
 <font-folder path="/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice"/>
</font-config>

And I get a tick out of U(buntu):