xslt to generate XSL-FO table-layout=fixed

Hello, I currently have an XSLT that transforms XML to XSL-FO. We're
using FOP as the engine.

Since FOP only supports table-layout="fixed", I'm in a small bind.

The XSLT transforms regular XHTML tables to XSL-FO tables. Since in
HTML we don't know how many columns the table will hold before hand, I
can't seem to figure out a way to generate a fixed table layout in FO,
since I'm not sure how many fo:table-column elements will be present
in each table.

Has anyone ever come up with a solution for something similar. I
googled for some XSLT/XPath way of solving this, and most solutions
lead to having a columns="#" attribute in the table element. Since we
can't enforce this, is there another way of possibly counting the
columns in say the first row, to generate the fo:table-column elements?

What's the most elegant way of resolving this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Ilya