Re: [xsl] Help getting started with XSL PDF generation

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 1) can I get started without the fo engine?

If you mean how can you start experimenting with XSLT, generate HTML
rather than FO initially. If you generate FO and haven't got an FO
engine to convert it to something else then it's just a pile of XML and
there is not much you can do with it.

> 2) will the xsl:fo namespace work without the engine (local) - so, the
> namespace is valid and the transformations take place accordingly

Namespaces don't "work" they are just names. To anything except an
XSL-FO renderer an XSL:Fo file is just some XML with unknown element
names. So you can use an XML parser to check that it is well formed, for
example but you can't really do much else.

> 3) does someone have a simple "hello world" -- or, depending on your
> up bringing -- a "foo bar" sample?

there are lots of examples to generate FO files  but the result will
look like

<fo:root>
 ...
   <fo:block>hello world</fo:block>


It won't look like a typeset document unless you install some program
that reads FO files and generates pdf (or postscript or ...)

Most people using FO generate PDF either as a batch process or in the
server, and serve pdf files so the client just needs acrobat (or
similar) plugin on the client. i suppose it would in theory be possible
to have a plugin on the client that took an FO file and then converted
it to something viewable and displayed this rendered result, but I don't
know of any (Although having such a system was the original motivation
for specifying the XSLT language, the idea being that you would serve
XMl documents with a style specifcation (written in XSLT) that specified
the style (in XSL FO) to be rendered in a native FO browser. However 
this never really happened and mostly transformation happens on server
side, and where it does happen client side, it invariably goes to
(X)HTML.

David

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