XML Training Overview
This course introduces the eXtensible Stylesheet Language, or XSL -- also known as XSL with Formatting Objects or XSLFO, to distinguish it clearly from XSLT. XSLFO provides the ultimate, standards-based solution to producing print and other presentation documents from XML information. This course teaches XSL with a focus on producing PDFs, using Apache FOP as the formatting engine. Though XSL is quite a dense technology, this one-day course provides a solid grounding in the basic techniques, and students will leave the course ready to tackle simple to moderately complex formatting tasks.
XML Training Learning Objectives
- Describe the relationship between XSLT and XSLFO, and their roles in the typical XML-to-print production process.
- Understand the formatting objects model, including the concepts of page, area, block, and line.
- Build page masters and master sets to define common page layouts and area models.
- Build page sequences to produce body, header and footer content.
- Format content using blocks, inlines, lists and tables.
- Take explicit control of document pagination.
- Apply properties to formatting objects and use XSLFO's property-inheritance model effectively.
- Build tables of contents and embed hyperlinks into documents.
XML Training Prerequisites
- Students must be fluent in XML and comfortable with XSLT, as the exercises involve a good deal of hand-writing the transformations that produce the XSL formatting documents. Course "XSLT" is excellent preparation
XML Training Course duration
1 day
XML Training Course outline
Chapter 1. Getting Started
- Formatting XML
- XSLT and XSLFO
- Flow of Information
- Formatting Objects
- Properties
Chapter 2. Page Masters
- Pages and Areas
- The Page-Master Model
- Regions
- Writing Mode and Orientation
- The Page-Sequence Model
- Flows
- Page-Sequence Masters
- Properties and the Inheritance Model
Chapter 3. Formatting
- Flows
- Blocks and Layout Options
- Inlines and Layout Options
- Lists
- Tables
- Controlling Pagination
Chapter 4. Formatting
- Page Numbering
- Identifying Content
- Page-Number Citations
- Links
- Tables of Contents
Appendix A. Learning Resources
Hardware/Software Requirements
Hardware – minimal
500 MHz, 256 meg RAM, 50 meg disk space.
Hardware – recommended
1.5 GHz, 512 meg RAM, 50 meg disk space.
Operating system
Tested on Windows XP Professional. The course software should be viable on all Windows or Linux systems which support a J2SE 1.4 SDK (if using FOP) or another compliant XSLFO processor.
Software
All free downloadable tools.
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