XSL-FO and CSS: Two Paths, One Destination

When it comes to styling DITA for PDF transformations, the stylesheet language that gets used most often is XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). This might be because the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) uses XSL-FO as the primary path for PDF transformation and has built-in support for several FO processors. But there is another way to achieve a pretty PDF with DITA-OT: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is becoming more commonly used for print because of its simplicity and new DITA adopters are taking this alternate path instead of the traditional XSL-FO. Antenna House’s formatting engine, AH Formatter, supports both XSL-FO and CSS so customers have options to choose from.

What can the audience expect to learn?

Some people using the DITA-OT are not aware that they can choose between XSL-FO and CSS for PDF transformation. The audience will get a better understanding of the main differences between XSL-FO and CSS for paged media, what plugins to use, and how each process works using the DITA-OT and Antenna House Formatter.

Meet the presenter

Celina Huang is a Sales & Marketing Specialist at Antenna House, Inc., a leader in the field of document formatting and conversion. She has 9 years of experience managing several next generation software products and specializes in XML related technologies.