Definitive XSL-FO

Rating:
Summary: Read the book... great for understanding the model
Review: As the second thing I read on FO, this book is great. The first being the spec itself, which is a pain in the neck to understand.

Definitive XSL-FO helped me understand the goals of the FO model and the details of the model itself. Great as a first step towards implementation.

Getting through the 400 odd pages took about a week.

Rating:
Summary: A safe bet
Review: Definitive XSL-FO is definitely definitive. It's not a huge tome, but does a good job packing a huge specification into less than 500 pages still retaining readability. Rendering documents is something very few developers ever master, I believe. If you're one of those who are disciplined enough to actually learn XSL-FO, this book is a safe bet.

After giving a thorough introduction to the history and related specifications, as well as the fundamental concepts of the subject area, mister Holman switches from "prose" to "reference" mode. Most of the book is all about introducing individual subjects in a concise way along with the element descriptions. Lists, tables, floats, footnotes, and so on. I have to give credit to the author for managing to come up with a granularity for these chapters that doesn't feel too overwhelming to grasp.

For a technical reference, a good index is something not to haggle about. Obviously the true level of usefulness can only be conceived via practical use, and without an ongoing project actually using XSL-FO, I must resort to a gut feeling, which is a good one. Also, the layout and typesetting is visually very functional which is yet another key requirement for a reference type of book.

To me, Definitive XSL-FO strikes as being simply a valuable reference. Far more approachable than the W3C document itself, and manages to teach the subject in layman's terms. A complex subject made simple.

Rating:
Summary: The complete explanation of XSL-FO
Review: The book covers all the topics mentioned in W3C XSL 1.0 Recommentation. I found other books only covers part of it. But I found the book like to present topics in point form, some readers may not like this style. Also, it separated the description of formatting properties from formatting object like the W3C XSL 1.0 Recommentation, I think this approach is not so helpful because readers cannot thoroughly read each formatting object and related things in one place until he reached the appendix.

Rating:
Summary: How did this book get published?
Review: There are some exposition paragraphs at the beginning of each topic. Otherwise the book is just page after page of bulleted lists. It's confusing, hard to read, and not worth your time. Read the O'Reilly book on XSL-FO instead.

Rating:
Summary: Harder than HTML
Review: You have undoubtedly heard much of XML, but that deals with the storage and transmission of data, and not with its presentation in a human readable form. And you have dealt with HTML. But that is strictly for Web pages, and deals best only with the presentation of data. While for the printed page, you may have worked with TeX or Postscript/PDF.

But is there a way to go from data in XML to its display on the web or on a page? And is this possible using a consistent syntax for both cases? More ambitiously, can we handle any human language, where the order of reading a page will vary? At the broadest level, this is where XSL-FO fits in. It is an intermediary language that does this translation. This book, by an expert in the field, actually emphasises the many variants of a printed page that cause a lot of the language's complexity.

Not too surprising. Printing incorporates conventions accrued over the centuries, from many different cultures. Devising a language rich enough to merge all of the possible variations is not simple. (A bottoms-up problem, if you will.) Plus, printing onto pages is much trickier than printed onto a browser. In the latter, you can have an infinitely long page, and you can hyperlink to anywhere. Real pages have finite length, and hence you get grubby little details like widows and orphans and footnotes that have to be handled carefully.

So be warned. The subject is far harder than HTML. This book is well suited for someone who has some prior experience in printed typography. Experience with TeX, troff or some of the Adobe page layout packages will be highly useful.

It is all a little ironic. XSL-FO is a computer language. But if we all read solely from computer displays, then much of the rationale for it would vanish. However, that day is the day of the paperless office. And until we gain those sunlit uplands, there is a need for XSL-FO and for an authoritative book to describe it, like this one.