For basic XSL-fo tags to work do i need to install a FO- processor..???

Question

I am new to XML... and i am forced to look at XSL-FO. My simple question is that using XSL-fo, i am not going to do any pdf generation work.. rather I just want to check on XSL-fo with its basic tags. I am to work in dotnet environment in Visual Studio. So to go ahead with this do i need a seperate FO Processor or there will be enough support without it.??

Because every single page which i visited, they tell, pdf generation and xsl-fo then install Fo processor.

And all the sample codes in net which i tried, the output was

""" The XML page cannot be displayed Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

---

The stylesheet does not contain a document element. The stylesheet may be empty, or it may not be a well-formed XML documen...""

Thanks in advance for your reply...

Answer 1

XSL-FO is an XML language that describes how paginated content should be rendered, but you need something to interpret it(typically an XSL-FO engine that renders PDF output).

If you just want a quick and easy way to see what the output will look like, you could add an XSLT processing instruction to your XSL-FO XML documents that point to the FO2HTML stylesheet that RenderX provides.

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="fo2html.xslt" media="screen"?>

The FO2HTML stylesheet will convert your XSL-FO XML into the equivalent HTML output(e.g. block become div and inline become span, etc).

There are some things that will not translate well into HTML, such as pagination(since HTML documents are essentially one giant page), but it might be a "good enough" solution for quick rendering.

To really test your XSL-FO and verify that the output is correct, you should run it through an XSL-FO engine(or even a few, since different vendors have varying levels of support and it is sometimes difficult to tell if the problem is your XSL-FO or the rendering engine) and inspect the generated PDF output.