XSL Formatting Objects Developer's Handbook is a syntactical reference and a guide for developing practical solutions using the complete XSL toolkit. In exploring the available tools and architectures, the book allows programmers to understand and apply XSL as practitioners. XSL-FO is a complex specification that provides a framework for describing detailed document formatting characteristics. A primary goal of XML is to separate the data from presentation. Unlike HTML documents, XML documents contain no information about how those documnets will appear when displayed. The XSL-FO specification provides a standardized way to build stylesheets that express document formatting in pure XML notation.

Author Biography

Doug Lovell taught himself the Basic programming language on a PDP-11 time-sharing terminal when he was a young, impressionable freshman in high school. He saved his programs on punched paper tape, which he rolled up, banded, and stored in tobacco tins supplied by his pipe-smoking mathematics teacher. After becoming a certified flight instructor in Ohio and then moving to New York City to earn a fine arts degree in photography, Doug joined the electronic prepress and digital typesetting facility at Time, Inc. He picked up typesetting and prepress knowledge by working for a few years making Time, Life, Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated ready for the presses. While working prepress, he partnered in building and operating a business selling graphics tablets for the Commodore Amiga computer; he also wrote a program for animated cartoon drawing, for which he procured his first patent. He left Time to become a resident computer whiz for an engineering firm and to attend graduate school for a degree in computer science. Now Doug works as a software engineer for IBM Research. Typesetting got a grip on him again when he pulled duty to satisfy all the hard-copy requirements of the AutoLoan Exchange project. The project pioneered the process of applying for, approving, and closing automobile loans on the Internet. Doug applied the TeX typesetting language to typeset individualized loan contracts on demand. TeX was most popularly used to typeset mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science journals; this may have been the most commercial application of TeX ever undertaken. Doug's most recent program is an implementation of XSL Formatting Objects written with Java. He also has written several tools for working with XML and XSLT, early versions of which appeared on IBM's alphaworks new technologies Web site, and invented TeXML-an XML vocabulary for expressing TeX typesetting documents. He lives and breathes in the beautiful mid-Hudson Valley of New York, loves to hike the mountaintops, and flies aerobatics wherever he's allowed.