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 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

  Both bulleted and numbered lists are supported. XMLmind XSL-FO Converter tries to infer the numbering style from the label of the first list item. If the numbering style cannot be recognized list items are output as plain paragraphs. Nested lists are supported.

• 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

  Image support is achieved through the use of external converter classes. XMLmind XSL-FO Converter comes with a simple converter class that supports the GIF, JPEG and PNG formats. Image scaling is supported.

• 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 instream-foreign-object element is not 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.