xhtml2fo.xsl

Original Copyright Antenna House, Inc. (http://www.antennahouse.com) 2001, 2002.

Updates 2008 Jeff Rafter for Apache FOP 0.94

Changes

• Font/bold modifications to support FOP implemented 400 and 700 weight
• Table border changes
• Class attribute processing (supporting context sensitive keep and breaks)
• Class attribute handling templates
• Keeps on table rows (within page)
• Table caption support modified (using blocks and normal tables for compat.)

Todo

• Page customization in breaks
• Landscape support
• Table cell clipping

Problems

• Make sure there is no doctype in your HTML, currently this causes timeouts
• Make sure there is no xml:lang, for some reason causing invalid documents

Requirements

The output of this stylesheet should be cross renderer compatible. On OSX you
can use the FOP rederer and tidy (if necessary):

sudo port install fop sudo port install tidy

The script/convert program in the repository shells to these and assumes they
are in your path.

Usage

Download the latest Apache FOP bin release

fop -xml your-page.html -xsl xhtml2fo.xsl -pdf your-doc.pdf

If your HTML is not well-formed you will run into problems. You can download
tidy to modify it

tidy your-page.html -b -c -q -asxhtml -o your-revised-page.html

Keeps and Breaks

This version of the stylesheet tries to support keeps and breaks more fully. If
you want to break after a block simply set the class attribute:

<div class="break-after">...</div>

or

<div class="break-before">...</div>

If the class appears on a block level element it assumes you want to break the
page. If it appears on an inline element it assumes you want to break the line.

Keep works similarly. You can use keep-together, keep-with-next and
keep-with-previous. Note that this is not necessary within tables, by default
rows are always kept together. If used within a table, however, the stylesheet
assumes your context to be within-column. Otherwise if used on a block it will
assume within-page. If used on an inline element it will assume the context
within-line. By default heading level elements are always written with
keep-with-next.

For example:

<ul class="keep-together">
  <li>Item 1</li>
  <li>Item 2</li>
  <li>Item 3</li>    
</ul>

If the list would naturally fall on a page break, the whole list will be moved
to the next page. Also:

<img src="/images/figure-1.png"> 
<div class="keep-with-previous caption">Some caption about figure 1</div>

Class processing

A simple template has been added near the beginning of the stlyesheet to allow
for handling additional CSS classes via templates:

<xsl:template name="class-template">
  <xsl:param name="class"/>
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="$class = 'odd'">
      <xsl:attribute name="background-color">#EEE</xsl:attribute>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:when test="$class = 'numeric'">
      <xsl:attribute name="text-align">right</xsl:attribute>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:when test="$class = 'line'">
      <xsl:attribute name="border-top">1px dotted #AAA</xsl:attribute>
    </xsl:when>
  </xsl:choose>  
</xsl:template>

This is not ideal but does allow for some class based customization.