Antenna House, Inc.

Tool Name:  Antenna House XSL Formatter

Vendor Contact Information:

Michael Miller

Antenna House, Inc.

7272 Wisconsin Ave.

Suite 300

Bethesda, Maryland 20814

USA

Telephone: +1 301-941-1925

mike@xslformatter.com

Price:

Antenna House offers both standalone ($1,250) and server ($5,000) licenses of XSL Formatter.

 

Brief Product Description:

Conforming to the W3C Recommendation for XSL-FO, Antenna House XSL Formatter is the most compliant software available and is used in hundreds of installations worldwide. PDF output, multilingual support (including Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai), SVG support and much more are all standard features of Antenna House XSL Formatter. Antenna House offers in Formatter advanced features that previously have only been available in software products costing many times more.

Formatter also supports:

·        Portraits and landscape pages in a document;

·        Multiple page sizes;

·        Recto-verso pages;

·        Multiple writing directions on a pages;

·        Headers/footers;

·        Generated page numbers;

·        Multiple columns of text on a page;

·        Generated ToCs;

·        Re-sorting items for output;

·        Tables, including running heads, row and column spans, rotated text, and nested tables;

·        Floating areas;

·        Widow/orphan control.

The Windows version of Formatter supports any Windows print driver. The standalone version has a GUI that permits easy drag and drop of the files and a WYSIWYG "What You See Is What You Get" preview of the formatted document prior to printing.

Formatter is a state of the art software product available for Windows, Sun and Linux. Written in C++ and fully supporting Unicode, Formatter takes advantage of many of the advanced tools available to today's software developers. Formatter offers .NET, COM, Java and command line

interfaces.

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

Formatter is intended for those users that want to format XML or structured materials into PDF, print or screen output. The software is available for Windows, Unix and Sun environments. Formatter offers Java, .Net, COM and command line interfaces.

Target documents are those that can be produced in batch and do not require any manual adjustments. Formatter is ideally suited for web applications, technical documentation, invoices and statements, and multilingual publications.

 

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)?:

Formatter supports most of the XSL-FO specification.

 

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

Antenna House has developed numerous extensions to Formatter to support customer specific requirements and features not provided for by the W3C Recommendation.

·        XSL Extensions by Antenna House (Apr 24, 2003; Rev Sep 8, 2003)
The namespace of XSL Extensions by Antenna House has the URI
http://www.antennahouse.com/names/XSL/Extensions.
<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"
xmlns:axf="http://www.antennahouse.com/names/XSL/Extensions">

·         Extended Elements

·          axf:document-info [V2.5]
Common Usage: Specifies the document information. The information is embedded into PDF.
Extended Properties:

1.        Bookmark for PDF

2.        Column Footnote

3.        Revision Bar

4.        Column Rule

5.        Page Background

6.        Page Number

7.        Text Treatment

8.        Others

·          axf:base-uri

·          axf:soft-hyphen-treatment
The axf:soft-hyphen-treatment specifies to output SOFT HYPEN.

·         Extended Values

·          clear
Following values are extended.
Value: start | end | left | right | inside | outside | both | none | inherit

·          float
Following values are extended.
Value: before | start | end | left | right | inside | outside | none | inherit

·          writing-mode
Following values are extended.
Value: lr-tb | rl-tb | lr-bt | rl-bt | tb-rl | tb-lr | bt-rl | bt-lr | lr | rl | tb | inherit
Values have the following meanings.

°          lr-bt
Inline component and text within a line are written left-to-right. Lines and blocks are placed bottom-to-top.

°          rl-bt
Inline component and text within a line are written right-to-left. Lines and blocks are placed bottom-to-top.

°          tb-lr
Inline component and text within a line are written top-to-bottom. Lines and blocks are placed left-to-right.

°          bt-rl
Inline component and text within a line are written bottom-to-top. Lines and blocks are placed right-to-left.

°          bt-lr
Inline component and text within a line are written bottom-to-top. Lines and blocks are placed left-to-right.

In addition to the above extensions that are all part of the standard product, Antenna House offers optional extensions for hyphenation and barcodes.

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

1.        Support of multilingual formatting including Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew

2.        "True" Conformance to the XSL-FO W3C Recommendation

3.        Proven software

4.        .NET, COM, Java and Command line interfaces

5.        GUI for standalone licenses

6.        Support for any Windows print driver