Foxon FO indenter

Foxon is a FO emitter/indenter to be used with Saxon. It can indent and prettify FO output, making it suitable for human inspection and editing, without introducing artefacts that change the layout of the PDF file.

Why Foxon? I ran into some problems while rendering PDF documentation for the Firebird project. Since the FO processor we use - Apache FOP - has some limitations, we need to hand-correct the FO files that Saxon produces from the DocBook sources. This is practically unfeasible with unindented, unprettified XSL-FO output. But if you specify the indent="yes" option, newlines are inserted in some places where they shouldn't be, causing extra empty lines in the PDF output. Also, even in the prettified files the lines may still be very long, which makes a lot of horizontal scrolling necessary e.g. if you want to inspect an element's attributes. That's why I needed a FO-aware XML indenter, and that's how Foxon came to be.

Source code and binaries will be placed here within 1-2 weeks. If you want Foxon now, drop me an email at paul at vinkenoog dot nl. I've got a working version ready, but I want to reorganise the source a little before I commit it to CVS.

Paul Vinkenoog

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