I wanted to convert some xml to a magazine like pdf document. A lot like what Latext allows you to do however i was not able to find any new books or online tutorials on the subject. Is it worth investing in using this technology or not?
Also, I looked at the Apache XSL-FO project and their last release was in august 2008.
p.s. commercial packages are not an option :(
There is currently no free XSL-FO formatter besides FOP and a few others, which are (IMHO) not really usable. But that does not mean, XSL-FO is dead or so, it is used heavily in technical documentation.
Creating a full featured, standard compliant XSL-FO formatter is pretty hard, and FOP is not there yet. I'd guess that they are bitten by the pure complexity of the standard.
My company is currently creating another XSL-FO formatter with focus on high typographical output based on LuaTeX, so I know I bit of this area. It is not decided yet whether this will be open sourced or not. (Sorry that I can't help you there).
So my answer is: go with Apache FOP. Even if the last change is some time ago, it is pretty usable at this point. And XSL-FO is far from being dead. If you can afford it, use a decent XML Editor (such as OxygenXML) for editing, it makes editing XSL stylesheets fun. (I don't get any money by mentioning this.)
I guess the only reason for the less availability of XSL-FO processors is due to the fact that it's formatting options are pretty large and quite complex too..
Since the amount of complexity involved, no one wants to sweat so much and make it open sourced. I heard there were quite good number of cool commercial processors available for XSL-FO. Even Apache FOP is a nice one to generate pdfs out of it.
Though i haven't used LuaTex, i found XSL-FO is a fun to work. Also it uses just XML to generate pdfs. If you ask me i will tell, it's simple yet powerful. And also i don't want it to die either.. :)
If you are new in this area you can also use a visual design tool. I found the XSL-FO Designer from Ecrion to be good for both programmers familiar with XSLT and XSL-FO and old ladies that need to make changes to the templates (we are deploying a desktop solution based on XSL-FO that replaces an older proprietary solution and the ladies can make small changes to the document templates :) ).
FOP is indeed not maintained anymore, but the commercial vendors are doing a great job at providing faster and quite affordable solutions and the set of features is growing with every release (a 2.0 draft of the XSL-FO specifications is now in the works!).
Apache FOP is maintained and has only recently reached version 1.0 but don't be fooled this isn't the first release as is the culmination of many years of work. There was a period serveral years ago where it looked as if the project was dead but they were working on major changes at the time. Since then there have been releases on a regular basis with each one improving the compatibility and functionality.
Also and if you do have problems (I mean bugs or technical issues with the renderer not questions about FO) I've found the FOP team really helpful and have always given quick responses.