XSLT Tutorial >> XSLT Formatting.

XSLT Formatting is the World Wide Web Consortium's specification for Extensible Style sheet Language (XSL) comes in two pieces:

• XSLT, a language for transforming XML files, and
• XSL Formatting Objects called as XSL FO, an XML expressions for specifying formatting semantics.

XSLT Formatting is easy to learn and use here in this XSLT Tutorial. With only a unassuming investment of time, developers can convert an XML document to an HTML files that every one can display in their own browsers. This explains why developers are greeting XSLT Formatting with great enthusiasm. "Transforming XML" is a great place to get started working with XSLT Formatting.

XSL Formatting Objects is itself an XML-based markup language that lets you specify in great detail the pagination, outline, and styling the information that will be applied to your own content. The XSL FO markup is quite complex. It is also verbose; virtually the only practical way to produce an XSL FO document is to use XSLT formatting to produce a source file. Finally, once you have this XSL FO document, you need some way to render it to an output medium. There are few tools available to do this final step. For these reasons, XML FO has not caught on as quickly as XSLT.

Rather than explain XSL FO in its entirety, this section of XSLT Tutorial will give you enough information to use the major features of XSL Formatting.. 

After the XSLT Formatting document's beginning tag, we have to describe what kinds of pages our document can have. Our document will have three kinds of pages shown in under. To provide somewhere to stay the stapling area, the cover page and right-hand pages will have more margin space at the left. The content pages will also have a region for a header and footer as shown in below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">

<fo:layout-master-set>
  <fo:simple-page-master master-name="A4">
    <!-- Place your xslt templates here -->
  </fo:simple-page-master>
</fo:layout-master-set>

<fo:page-sequence master-reference="A4">
  <!-- Place your xslt content here -->
</fo:page-sequence>

</fo:root>