Article:		Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL
Subject:		Not enough tools
Date:		2005-01-20 08:19:44
From:		netwizard
My company uses XSLT every day to transform XML documents into PDF via XSL-FO. While I do like the approach provided by the authors via CSS, nevertheless there aren't any tools out there that can take advantage of it. I tried running the stylesheet in Opera and Firefox, and the results weren't too nice. Aside from Prince which is commercial, there aren't any other tools. My company uses Apache's Xalan and FOP tools which are free. We see no incentive to switch to something commercial. So my question is: are there any open source tools which do this?

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• Not enough tools
  2005-01-20 23:38:35 PeterRing [Reply]
  
  Some more tools:

  
  http://www.re.be/css2xslfo/

  
  "CSSToXSLFO is a utility which can convert an XML document, together with a CSS2 style sheet, into an XSLFO document, which can then be converted into PDF, PostScript, etc. with an XSLFO-processor. It has special support for the XHTML vocabulary, because that is the most obvious language it would be used for. The tool has a number of page-related extensions. It also comes with an API in the form of an XML filter."

  
  http://www.turnkey.com.au/tksweb/products/topleaf.html
  http://www.turnkey.com.au/tksweb/papers/gjnop2003.pdf

  
  "A great deal of work has gone into creating such standards as CSS, XSLT and XSL-FO, which allow human readable XML documents to be rendered on-screen, as hard copy or PDF. CSS is easy to work with using GUIs even non-experts can produce quite complex stylesheets but lacks key facilities for producing publishable quality pagination. XSLT/FO has virtually unlimited potential for the manipulation and display of source material. However the design of the required formatting objects, not to mention the XSLT transforms which create those objects, is well beyond the capabilities of non-specialists. The latest version of Turn-Key's TopLeaf rendering system is an attempt to provide the facilities of professional quality typesetting, but using a simple intuitive interface."
  
  

• Not enough tools
  2005-01-20 13:14:43 howcom [Reply]
  
  It's true that browsers so far have focused screen use and don't print well -- with or without CSS. I see signs of a renewed interest in printing and expect the next generation of browsers to support more print-specific features. Prince and other similar products (which I'm sure will appear) will be used on the server side and for batch processing.