Presentation by Michael Miller at XPubs 2008.

XSL-FO is a powerful document formatting standard from the W3C that is being used in thousands of implementations worldwide.  It is used extensively for training documentation, by both government and professional publishers, in the aerospace and defense sectors and by software developers, financial institutions, automobile manufacturers and virtually everywhere documents need to be formatted.

DITA is a very good example of where and why XSL-FO is being used.  When formatting DITA for print and PDF there are a wealth of resources available to enable you to quickly and at a fraction the cost of other possible solutions, implement XSL-FO for your requirements. XSL-FO offers a powerful and standards-based, yet lowcost, solution for formatting DITA content. This presentation will answer questions such as: “What is XSL-FO?” “Why should you consider XSL-FO for formatting documents and DITA content?” “What kinds of documents can I format with XSL-FO?” “How complex can the documents be?” “What is available to aid me with formatting DITA with XSL-FO?” “Why not use a tool like Framemaker or FOSI?” “How much does it cost?”  “What tools are available for XSL-FO?”and “Who is using XSL-FO today?”