Re: I'm obviously doing something wrong

> Weirdly (to me) when I actually uploaded it to a Unix host and
> tried it from the command line, I got a workable document:
>
> $ fop -xml Topics.xml -xsl mTopicsPanels.xsl Topics-2.pdf

FOP does two-pass processing like other tools do, but it keeps the result 
of the first pass (the FO object) in memory and then processes that to 
produce PDF. Other tools require two separate commands. FOP provides this 
one-command processing as a convenience, but you have to be willing to 
accept Xalan's limitations to get it, and you are not the first person it 
has struck as odd. (Disclaimer: I've certainly not used every tool out 
there, so maybe one-command processing is the norm, but I get the 
impression it's not. Maybe that's something that is evolving as tools 
mature, too.)

By the way, you can use an XSLT processor other than Xalan with FOP. I 
routinely use Saxon 8.x (8.4 at present) so that I can use XSLT 2.0 
features (notably result-document and for-each-group, but others are 
creeping into my work, too). That gives me a FO file with a name like 
something.fo. Then the following command:

fop something. fo something.pdf

gives me my PDF file.

FWIW

(And please forgive me if you know all that. I thought it might be 
information you could use in the event that you didn't already know.)

Jay Bryant
Bryant Communication Services
(presently consulting at Synergistic Solution Technologies)