XSL FO 2 0 Requirements

Today, the XSL Working Group, that I’m a part of as a representative of Inventive Designers, released the first Working Draft of the Requirements Document for XSL-FO 2.0. It describes the various potential new features we are considering adding in XSL-FO 2.0. We tried to make the document easily readable, including drawings for many requirements.

I’m personally very interested in the features that would enable even more types of design-intensive documents to be generated with XSL-FO. For example the non-rectangular areas, text on path, runarounds and copyfitting would allow to have even more creative design in documents. These are the features that are typically used in Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress to manually craft documents. With XSL-FO 2.0, the intent is that this will be truly dynamic, without necessary handcrafting, and available as an interoperable Open Standard. Combine this with the power that XSL-FO (and consequently our product Scriptura) today already has for generating business documents, and you get a very powerful technology to generate truly dynamic heavily designed documents, like the next generation transpromo documents, personalized brochures, catalogs, etc.

I’m also very proud of it myself, as I’m the editor of the document. It feels like ‘my first publication’ on the W3C site, but of course it is an accomplishment of the entire XSL Working Group. If you’re somehow using XSL-FO, or expect to be using XSL-FO once these features are added, please give your feedback, as explained in the feedback section. As a result of this feedback, the Working Group will be able to set priorities.