XSLT and XSL-FO Combined

Overview

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other objects such as HTML for web pages or plain text. XSL Formatting Objects, or XSL-FO, is a markup language for XML document formatting which is most often used to generate PDFs. The XSLT stylesheet contains a collection of template rules: instructions and other directives that guide the processor in the production of the output document. The general idea behind XSL-FO's use is that the user writes a document, not in FO, but in an XML language. Then, the user uses an existing XSLT stylesheet or creates one of his/her own which then transforms / converts the XML into XSL-FO. From there, an FO processor finally renders the FO-document in formats like PDF. This training starts by presenting the basic concepts of XSLT and XML processing. It then covers the variety of XSLT processing options, conditional processing, variables and paramers as well as sorting, grouping and filtering XML contents with the aid of XPath expressions. You will learn how to generate output in (X)HTML, text, and also XML. The second part of the training provides you with a substantial knowledge of the FO standard and shows you in many hands-on labs how to create an XSL-FO document so that a real-world XML file can be published as a complex book.