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Features

Features

XMLmind XSL-FO Converter supports the following output formats (see samples):

  • RTF, conforming to version 1.6 of the specification, compatible with MS-Word 2000+.
  • WordprocessingML, compatible with MS-Word 2003+.
  • Office Open XML, compatible with MS-Word 2007+.
  • OpenDocument, compatible with OpenOffice/LibreOffice Writer 2.0.2+.

It preserves the structure of source documents, as well as most of the presentation information:

  • Paragraph attributes

    Most paragraph attributes (e.g. indentation) are supported. Vertical spacing is handled reasonably in most cases.

  • Font attributes

    Most font attributes (family, size, weight, etc) are supported.

  • Lists

    XFC automatically tries to infer the numbering style from the label of the first list item. Both bulleted and numbered lists are supported. Nested lists are supported.

    When the heuristics used by XFC are insufficient to infer the type of a list, it's still possible to explicitly specify this type by adding an xfc:label-format proprietary attribute to the fo:list-block.

    When the heuristics used by XFC are insufficient to infer the type of a list and the xfc:label-format attribute is absent from the fo:list-block, then list items are output as plain paragraphs. That is, the list items look as expected, but will not behave as proper list items when edited in MS-Word or OpenOffice.org.

  • Tables

    XMLmind XSL-FO Converter supports both the fixed and automatic table layout, as well as the two border models defined in the W3C recommendation. The implementation of the collapsing border model does not strictly conforms to the CSS2 specification, but should give the expected result in most cases.

  • Images

    Out of the box, XFC supports WMF, EMF, BMP (only .NET version and Java 1.5+), TIFF (only .NET version and with jai_imageio.jar in the CLASSPATH), GIF, JPEG and PNG graphics.

    Implementing the public, documented, Graphic and GraphicFactory interfaces (IGraphic and IGraphicFactory for the .NET version) allows third-party programmers to add support for even more graphic formats.

  • Embedded foreign XML

    The XML content of a fo:instream-foreign-object element is now passed to the proper GraphicFactory. For this to work, the fo:instream-foreign-object element must have a content-type attribute containing a media type supported by a registered GraphicFactory.

    Note that content-type ``sniffing'' is implemented only for SVG and MathML and that content-type attributes starting with "namespace-prefix:" are completely ignored.

  • Headers and footers

    static-content elements associated with the before and after regions are converted to page headers and footers respectively.

  • Page references

    Page references (page-number-citation elements) are supported.

  • Hypertext links

    Both internal and external links are supported.

For a complete list of supported objects/properties, see the conformance statement.

In addition, XFC supports an XSL-FO extension to generate structured document tags (SDTs) in an Office Open XML document. This extension makes it possible to produce simple forms that can be loaded and filled in MS-Word 2007 (see introductory example).

Limitations

Though XMLmind XSL-FO Converter implements the greater part of the W3C recommendation, it does not support all XSL-FO features. Below is a list of the current major limitations of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter.

  • The leader element is only partly supported.
  • The float and marker elements are not supported.
  • The writing-mode property is not supported (value lr-tb is assumed).

The conformance level of XMLmind XSL-FO Converter may be improved in future versions, however it must be stressed that a full conformance cannot be achieved due to the own limitations of its output formats.