S1000D Stylesheet Development
Docuneering are XSL specialists but before we continue, it’s probably worth just clearing up exactly what XSL is.
We have all seen: XSL, XSLT, XSL-T, XSLFO, FO and XSL-FO
XSL or the Extensible Stylesheet Language, is a W3C recommendation for the transformation and presentation of XML documents. It comes in two main flavours:
- XSL Transformation (XSLT)
- XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO)
With XSLT you can transform XML to something else, for example HTML. You can, however, also transform XML to XML. This might initially sound a bit pointless but if, for example, you have S1000D Data Modules in Issue 2.3 and you want to change them to Issue 4.2 then this would be an example of an XML to XML transformation.
With XSL-FO you are transforming the XML to an FO file. The resulting FO file can then be run through an FO Processor (you can see where Apache FOP got its name from now) and a PDF file comes out the other end. Because this process still requires a transformation (from XML to FO), it could be argued that "XSLT-FO" or “XSL-T-FO” more accurately represents the process. Yes but XSL-FO it is.
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