RenderX

Chapter 9 of the VisualXSL User Guide

Glossary

Glossary

  • IREn RenderX IREn is an XML to PDF (XSL FO) formatter. It takes input in XML, applies an XSL transformation to build XSL Formatting Objects representation, and then formats the Formatting Objects into PDF or PostScript. IREn supports multiple raster and vector graphic formats. Among them is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an XML-based vector graphics representation that is widely used in business applications and for fine typesetting.

     

  • XSL-FO XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is an XML vocabulary for the formatting of documents. XSL-FO is part of XSL, so that the usual way to produce XSL-FO documents is by transforming XML documents using XSLT. Although the principles behind XSL and CSS (the other Style Sheet Language created by W3C) are quite different, it is planned to align the formatting model between XSL-FO and CSS, so that formatting engines can be based on the same code, both languages can be used to achieve the same results, and the formatted results will look identical.

  • XSL XSL (Extensible Style Language) is a Style Sheet Language that can be used for displaying XML documents. Using XSL is two-step process, the first step being a transformation of the XML document using XSLT, and the second step being the rendering of the result of the transformation, which is done using XSL-FO. XSL covers the same application area as CSS but is much more powerful, because the transformation step (using XSLT) can perform arbitrarily complex transformations of the XML document, whereas CSS is not able to make any structural changes to the XML document.

  • XSLT XSLT (XSL Transformations) is a specialized Programming Language for transforming XML documents. Although XSLT is part of XSL, and as such intended to be used for transforming XML documents into XSL-FO for presentation purposes, it is not limited to this application area. XSLT uses XML syntax (that is, it is a Programming Language in XML syntax), even though it is based on DSSSL (which uses a Lisp-like syntax). XSLT is particularly interesting in B2B scenarios, where XML documents must be transformed.

  • .NET Framework .NET Framework, created by Microsoft, is a software development platform focused on rapid application development, platform independence, and network transparency. .NET is Microsoft's strategic initiative for server and desktop development for the next decade.