Re: Creating multiple PDF files from a single XSL-FO

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From: "Kevin M Bray" <kevin.bray@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 11:30 AM
To: <xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re:  Creating multiple PDF files from a single XSL-FO script

It looks like you're using XSLT to transform the XML to XSL-FO, is that right? In that case, I'd be inclined to use a xsl:param in the style sheet to specify which letter to process, then run the transformation once for each letter.

Kevin Bray

Quoting Mark Wilson <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

I have an index that I produce with XSL-FO in PDF format that has grown
to hundreds of pages. The file is updated quite often. Users of my
website are complaining that the file is too large and clumsy to use. I
would like to break it into separate files, one for each letter of the
alphabet. That way, users could download and use only the letter of
interest.

I could break my XML file into separate files first, then run my
current XSL-FO file on each of those segments to accomplish what I
want, but this seems like brute force.

While I know how to break an XML file into separate files, I cannot
seem to get my head around how to do that with XSL-FO. I do not see how
to take the things that are done once (setting up odd and even pages,
etc) and ask the file to do that multiple times. Can someone make this
a bit clearer for me?

Right now the XSL-FO is set up like this:

<fo:root>
... fo pdf creation stuff: layout, page-sequence, etc
<fo:root/>

<template>
.... my xml document processing stuff (many templates)
<template/>

How do I invoke fo:root more than once? Or have I got it all wrong?
Thanks,