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.