This document discusses Antenna House Formatter, an XML formatting software. It supports XSL-FO, CSS, and multiple languages. FO is recommended for advanced layouts as it allows more precise control, while CSS is suitable for simpler layouts due to its faster processing. The IRS and US Treasury use Antenna House Formatter to publish multilingual tax guides.

1. September 17, 2014
Tokushige Kobayashi
koba@antenna.co.jp
Antenna House, Inc.

2. The first release December 2000 (ja)
XSL-FO pre-recommendation
Version 5.0 (March 2009)～
Supports both FO and CSS

3. Multilingual
Arabic
Support Hebrew
Devanagari
Vengari
Gurmukhī
Gujǎrātī
Oriya
Tamil
Major Indic characters except Tibetan are supported.
Thai
Khmer
Lao
Vertical writing

4. Extended
Float (a)
PDF
Original Position
of a image
EPUB
Image is automatically moved
to the top of next page
Algorithm is specified in JIS X4051

5. Extended
Float (b)
IRS publishes multilingual tax guides by AH Formatter.
US Department of Treasury, Washington DC

6. MathML V3
New function of MathML V3.0
Elementary Math

7. FO or CSS, which one you should select?
• The layout can be specified using either XSL-FO or CSS.
Approximately the same layout can be specified by both.
• Many of FO properties have been quoted from CSS2. In addition, AH
Formatter has been extending FO and CSS in parallel.
• The main difference between FO and CSS is the structure
that applies the style.

8. FO
• FO is a technology for printing and is premised on batch
processing on a server.
• XML for printing purpose is transformed into FO by XSLT, etc.
The properties for layouts are applied to the transformed FO.
• In XSLT, elements and attributes can be specified by XPath.
Properties are prepared as the attribute set (xsl:attribute-set)
and the conditions for applying properties can be
specified exactly and meticulously.
• Complicated processing can be described for creating FO.

9. CSS
• CSS is a Web technology and simple and high-speed
processing and the dynamic layout will be required.
• Current CSS has a weakness in paged media. The layout
specification to the paged media is discussed in W3C CSS WG
now. The output to the paged media from AH Formatter is
the AH extension at present.
• In CSS, the element and the attribute of XHTML, which apply
the layout, is specified by selector rule. In addition, there is
a complex cascading and priority rule.
• This structure is suitable when the applicable condition of a
layout is easy.

10. Antenna House Recommends:
•FO for making an advanced and complicated
page layout.
•CSS for making a simple page layout.