Advent 3B2 Inc.

Tool Name: 3B2-FO

Vendor Contact Information:

Jurgen Haas

Price:

· Free evaluation download

· $100 if purchased within 30 days of download

· $150 if purchased after 30 days of download

Brief Product Description:

3B2-FO is a high speed, reliable, feature rich XSL-FO rendering tool. 3B2-FO software supports both simplified yet flexible document production workflows for adding composition and page formatting information to XML documents so they can be printed. In operation 3B2-FO takes either ready-made XSL-FO files containing layout and formatting data or files containing raw XML content plus an XSLT transformation script, and converts them into printable Postscript or PDF files.

3B2-FO was developed in accordance with the W3C XSL 1.0. recommendation. In

addition to providing compliance with the W3C XSL-FO specification, the software engine includes a number of additional functions that provide extended composition and page layout controls. These will give users more versatile document formatting capabilities resulting in higher quality document aesthetics.

The additional capabilities in 3B2-FO include controls over vertical justification on a page, extensive hyphenation controls, and the ability to add crop marks and registration marks to a page. Hyphenation features include the ability to specify the number of characters in words that can be hyphenated, the ability to prevent hyphenation at the end of a block and to use caps to keep capitalized words together, spacing controls (plus and minus) for letter and word spacing of text.

Intended Product Use (market, environment, target documents, etc.):

For all types of structured documents in vertical markets including technical documentation, directories, etc.

How much of the XSL-FO specification does your product support (that is, of the

FO elements and attributes how many does your product process correctly)?:

A lot of it (more than 50%)

Do you use extensions to XSL-FO? If so, please describe:

The current extensions include:

1. Crop/registration marks

2. Extended control over hyphenation

3. Vertical Justification

What is the most important feature/capability of your product:

Reliability, additional functionality, and high quality typography are among the most important features of 3B2-FO.

As 3B2-FO is derived from the XSL-FO support in the core product 3B2 it offers the reliability one would expect from a mature product.

Also by virtue of the fact that 3B2-FO is derived from the core product 3B2 Advent 3B2 can offer a fully compatible upgrade path and/or complementary product for documents that cannot be handled with XSL-FO.

The extensions including crop/registration marks, extended control over hyphenation and vertical justification all offer the user the desired additional functionality.