XSL- FO transformations

[AndyCheng]

Hi All,

I just like to ask, does anyone know if I can do an XSL-FO transformation on 2 XML instance documents?

If the answer is yes, is there a tool that allows this?

Regards,
Andy

 

[flumpy]

XSL-FO (FOP) <i>is</i> the tool that allows you to do this, but generally you would have to write the stylesheet (XSL-FO) that will specify the actual transformation to PDF.

FOP runs as a standalone application too.

http://mirrors.playboy.com/apache/xml/fop/#standalone-start

so you can write stylesheets and then run FOP on them manually.

Check out

http://xml.apache.org/fop/

which gives you a lot of information about FOP.

 

[JontyMC]

What's the difference between XSL-FO and FOP then? Just a subset of XSL-FO?

To answer the original question, use XSLT to do a transform from XML to XSL-FO and this can take data from any number of XML files.

 

[flumpy]

XSL-FO is the xsl language extension, FOP is the tool or API which transforms the XML to PDF using XSL-FO.

FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) is the world's first print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO) and the world's first output independent formatter. It is a Java application that reads a formatting object (FO) tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output. Output formats currently supported include PDF, PCL, PS, SVG, XML (area tree representation), Print, AWT, MIF and TXT. The primary output target is PDF. - from

http://xml.apache.org/fop/

You do not need to use XSLT to transform to XSL-FO and then PDF, you can transform XML -> PDF using XSL-FO and FOP in one go.

 

[flumpy]

ah scratch that last bit, Jon is right again. You do need to transform to XSL-FO first, and then process using FOP.

My apologees, its getting late.

 

[AndyCheng]

Hi All,

Thanks for all your responses. But I think I havent been clear about what I was asking.

When I was asking about XSL-FO transformation over 2 XML documents, I didnt mean using the same stylesheet for 2 or more XML documents.

I meant to ask if XSL-FO could render 2 XML documents simultaneously, ie these 2 XML documents will have different XML elements and I want to use the same XSL-FO to render both - so to print out one PDF file with information from 2 different XML instances.

If this is possible, what are the available tools?

Regards,
Andy

 

[JontyMC]

Thats what I was suggesting you do with XSL, although you can do both. You can do more or less anything you want with XSL.

 

[AndyCheng]

Hi All,

I tried what u said in FOP 20.5 however looks like its still not producing the right results. Im typing in this command:

fop -xsl pdf.xsl -xml file1.xml -xml file2.xml -pdf output.pdf

My XSL file does have an fo:root element and works completely fine when rendering a single XML file. When running the above line, it only renders the latest XML file.

Jonty, if ur doing something that im not, let me know.

Regards,
Andy