XSLfast is first of all an editor for XSL-FO documents. Start XSLfast and begin to create and define your document, similar to what you do in word processing or desktop publishing software. Drag and drop placeholders on the working sheet that later on can be replaced by your current data. This can be used for mail merging, formats processing, catalog production and other areas of publishing and cross media publishing applications.
Under Help/Register you can insert your key.
XSLfast uses new license keys. If you have a support subscription you will get new license keys automatically. If you need the new key immediately please send us an email with your support subscription number xslfast@opuscapita.com. If you have no support subscription you can purchase an update. For the update we need your current license key.
In the new version of XSLfast a tutorial with examples is included. Please find the tutorial in your XSLfast installation directory under Input/Tutorial (e.g.: ..\XSLfasthome\Input\Tutorial). In the directory Tutorial there are examples with short descriptions. All examples exist as layout, PDF, XSL, and FO file. You can open the examples directly in XSLfast.
With a renderer you can create a PDF document from an XSL-FO file. There are several commerical and open source renderers that support XSL-FO and work with XSLfast. They differ in functionality, price and performance. XSLfast is the shipped with FOP, which is open source and available for free. http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/.
XSLfast supports the commercial renderer XEP (from RenderX) and XSLformatter (from AntennaHouse) and FOP 0.20 and 1.0 from Apache.
We ship the correct Java version in the installation package. If you have installed old Java versions do not overwrite these versions. XSLfast needs at least the JRE-Version 1.5, but works with 1.6.
You will find information and useful links together with the standard documents on http://www.w3.org/style/XSL.
XSL is a language developed and standardized to W3C (http://www.w3.org/). XSL is a language that was originally thought to express style sheets. It consists of two main aspects which are XSLT and XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO). XSLT is a XML based language that transforms XML documents into other documents. XSL Formatting Objects is an XML based language to specify formats, layouts and styles of documents. For further information concerning XSLT and XSL-FO and on the format specification look at http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL.
FOP is a open source renderer developed by the Apache organization. See: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/. XSLfast uses FOP for rendering PDF and for previews, but can also be used with other commercial or open source renderers.
XSL-FO is a language that defines the style and the layout of a document. It can be compared to HTML and CSS, however XSL-FO allows to define page oriented documents. XSL-FO can be used to create PDF documents and these PDF files are strictly page oriented.
XSLfast has a wide range of applications. You can design templates, merge them with you XML data and create business documents, invoices, orders, data sheets, forms, catalogs, PDF files and much more.
XSLfast allows to define a document, merge your data with that document and create different output formats. You can create PDF, XML, HTML and other formats.
XSLfast has an editor that allows the user to directly write XSL-FO and XSLT. So whenever XSLfast doesn't have the necessary feature that you need for your application, you can write the XSLT or XSL-FO code according to your needs.