Re: XSL FO to HTML Stylesheet

Jon,

> You would need to implement some extension functions to ask the SVG engine
> about things like font metrics for doing the line breaks. The MSIE XSLT
> engine in IE5 could do this.

Besides line breaks, there are also column balancing, footnote placement, keeps
& breaks on lines/columns/pages, orphans & widows,  table layout calculations,
vertical alignment in table cells - to mention but a few ;-). As a result, your
extension functions will need to do the bulk of FOP/XEP's work - alas ;-(. In my
opinion, to view XSL FO's in a browser, it's more natural to write a dedicated
plugin using an existing XSL FO formatter.

XEP has an internal SAX interface at the very end of formatting, before the
PDFlib layer: at this point, everything is expressed in a dozen of formatting
primitives that map perfectly into SVG. Making an SVG output from there is
pretty easy, but I don't think it is better than PDF for viewing purposes -
let's handle text in text-oriented formats ;-).

BTW: any news from InDelv? They were doing an XSL FO browser, based on FOP. Does
anybody know how are the things going there? Their site makes vague promises of
"substantial support for the latest XSL release" but no specific data are
provided.

Regards,
Nikolai



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