What Is XEP?

XSL-FO Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟What Is XEP?

This section describes RenderX XEP, which is an XSL processor developed by RenderX that allows you to perform XSLT (XSL Transformations) and process XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) to paged output devices. RenderX does offer XEP Free Person edition.

What Is XEP? XEP is an XSL processor developed by RenderX that allows you to perform XSLT (XSL Transformations) and process XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) to paged output devices. Here is a short description from XEP user guide:

XEP is a library of Java classes that converts XML data to printable formats, such as PDF, PostScript, AFP, PPML. It can also produce SVG, XPS and XHTML files. XEP accepts either an XSL-FO file, or an XML file paired with an XSL stylesheet, as input. In the latter case, XEP uses an internal XSLT transformer to preprocess the XML file according to the XSL stylesheet, thereby converting it to an XSL-FO file. The XEP engine then processes the XSL-FO file.

The logical flow of document processing can be divided into three steps, as illustrated in the following figure:

The three steps are:

Parsing - XEP reads the XSL-FO file and creates an internal representation of the file in memory.
Formatting - The XSL-FO is fed into the formatter which creates and fills pages according to the specification defined in the XSL-FO document. Results of the formatting stage can be output as XML to be further processed later.
Generating - The XSL-FO file is converted to the requested output format - PDF, Post-Script, AFP, SVG, XPS, XHTML or PPML.