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Generate PDF files with XML, XSL-FO, and FOP: a step-by-step guide for the programmer. (Tutorial).

Article Excerpt
This article will give you enough information to use the major features of XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) in conjunction with Apache's FOP API for rendering documents in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF).

The W3C's specification for Extensible Stylesheet Language comes in two parts:

* XSLT: A language for transforming XML documents

* XSL-FO: An XML vocabulary for specifying formatting semantics

FOP (Formatting Objects Processor), which is part of Apache's XML project, is the world's first print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects. It's a Java application that reads an XSL-FO file and renders the output in PDF format. Other formats supported are XML, SVG, PS, PCL, Print, AWT, MIF, and TXT. To dig deeper, you may want to visit http://xml.apache. org/fop.

This tutorial uses Sun's JAXP API for XSLT transformation and Apache's FOP API for rendering PDF output. We'll use a Journal Subscription form that allows the user to enter details like name, payment mode, and bank details to subscribe to a journal. The form is a simple JSP page. Once the form is submitted, the request is...

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