- Average Customer Review:
Based on
8
reviews.
- Amazon.com Sales Rank: 360779
|
Product Description No matter how flexible and convenient digital information has become, we haven't done away with the need to see information in print. Extensible Style Language-Formatting Objects, or XSL-FO, is a set of tools developers and web designers use to describe page printouts of their XML (including XHTML) documents. XSL-FO is one of the few books to go beyond a basic introduction to the technology. While many books touch on XSL-FO in their treatment of XSLT, this book offers in-depth coverage of XSL-FO's features and strengths. Author Dave Pawson is well known in the XSLT and XSL-FO communities, and maintains the XSLT FAQ. XSL-FO is more than just a guide to the technology; the book teaches you how to think about the formatting of your documents and guides you through the questions you'll need to ask to ensure that your printed documents meet the same high standards as your computer-generated content. Written for experienced XML developers and web designers, no other book contains as much useful information on this practical technology.
Featured Customer Reviews A bit obsolete nowadays ...,
March 16, 2010 The book is a definitive reference for everybody that wants to get an understanding of the rationale behind XSL-FO.
That is because the basic stuff, like knowing the syntax is no longer an issue, as you can now edit the XSL-FO templates visually using editors from Ecrion or FOP.
It was written before XSL-FO 1.1 came out so new things like flow-maps and bookmarks are not covered.
Still, a good and useful read. Second edition needed,
January 24, 2010
Messy,
May 31, 2009 I think the book mentions all the important parts of XSL-FO, but it does not give me a good understanding of the subject. Maybe if I read it three times. The author is not able to explain the complicated matters to me, the things that separates XSL-FO from CSS. The table of contents is well organized, but when you start reading the chapters they are badly organized internally. It is hard to know what the author tried to tell you after reading a chapter. The chapters jump from topic to topic in an unpredictable way. The different chapters often repeat them self. The book contains a lot of typos and errors.Competent, but far from extraordinary,
January 05, 2006 The book is a competent explainiation of XSL-FO, which is an XML-based language for describing the appearance of text, usually for the purposes of printing it. If you thoroughly read everything, you will understand how areas, blocks, spacing, and the various other technicalities interrelate to one another.
However, the author does not seem to be very good at explaining these crucial concepts for an audience that has no or little familiarity with the subject matter. One can pick them up, but the author does not make it easy. In order to delineate the book into chapters, the author will make a mention of some crucial fact, but not go into detail on it until much later in the book. The material is complex enough, and the author's method of demarcation does not help the matter.
Also, as mentioned by others, this book does often use XSLT transform examples to "explain" XSL-FO concepts. While any significant use of XSL-FO will certainly use XSLT transforms to convert from some other XML format into the XSL-FO, it is not appropriate to offer examples of XSL-FO that are written as an XSLT transform. Having a chapter or two in techniques for writing XSLT transforms for XSL-FO would have been more appropriate than providing examples of XSL-FO concepts using XSLTs.
That being said, this book does cover some fairly difficult material. XSL-FO is very complex, particularly when it comes to positioning things. The information is all there, and it is all good. It is simply a matter of explaining that information in a way that one can read the book in a linear fashion and understand. To gain the full measures of XSL-FO, you will need to re-read the book, or at least the sections on position of elements. Not a book for the faint of heart,
January 15, 2003
You might also be interested in these items...
|
|