You are right! FOP NullPointerException errors are extremely unhelpful. I did try to create the xml page using the command line parser. This time it complained about that the xml file not being well-formed, even though the .fo file is. Not sure how that can happen. If I would remove the code below then every thing is fine. Does it make any sense to you?

<xsl:template match="node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
    <xsl:if test="contains(. ,'<sub>')">

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Oleg Tkachenko
Multiconn International, Israel