Many, many thank-yous for the lucid comments about fully-automated typography. I have tried to make similar points before (e.g. <http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2002/11/27/typesetters-are-not-machines/>), but you did it better. If you could expand that bit into an essay and get it published somewhere a lot of techies could read it and I could cite it, I would consider that a personal favor!

Because, yipes, I have had people coming to me wanting to "convert XML to PDF" (by which, of course, they meant beautifully-typeset pages), and I have wanted to wring their necks.

Speaking of quality printed output and formatting hardship. Take a look at the sidebar box in the pdf of this article. It's wide enough to start covering a bit of the letters in the 2nd column.

Great post Norm! The bit about odd and even numbered pages came as quite a revelation ;-)
How portable is the XSL? Or rather how standardised are the W3C pages? - I've been meaning to get certain other specs in hard copy for ages, but the default print CSS seems either to eat trees or be illegible.
Re. annotations - maybe run an Annotea server locally, with bookmarklets to aid posting? (Given FireFox has all that RDF underneath, there may even be a more direct way of supporting this, maybe already done...)
Next mission (should you choose to accept it): decent print version of RFCs on A4. This seems like a Holy Grail - I've heard it requested loads of times, never seen it done at all well.
Next mission++ : WebArch in RDF/XML. You know you want to ;-)

People interested in learning more about advanced use of XSL-FO (and XSLT!) stylesheets should check out Norm's XSLT stylesheets for converting DocBook to XSL-FO at http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/xsl/.

Re: Sidebar. Doesn't Amaya do annotation? It works offline, lets you save them, and the little web browser seems to do almost everything you describe. Granted, her UI sucks, though.

I do hope that element is retrieve-marker, or someone is going to have to Pay The Price.

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/webarch/html2fo.xsl gives me a 403 forbiden (although your local copy link works) Unless I missed it you haven't a link to the generated pdf?

"Did you hear me? CSS is never going to fix it."

That sounds like a challenge to me :)

If the specification you are trying to print is written in XHTML, why not try printing it to PDF using Prince?

Prince supports headers/footers and duplex printing, with no XSLT transform required and no XSL-FO, just CSS all the way.

Thanks for writing this up, Norm. But it's a bit uneven. We get links to the XSL and XSLT specs, as if we needed help finding those, but then you fly by "... so that I could produce PDF with xep" as if xep were a household word. You seem to mostly use open source tools, so I expected a bit of explanation. I spent a few hours trying to get FOP (xml.apache.org/fop/) to work. Is there any hope? Is there any competition for xep?

GREAT!!

I was wondering for months why nobody had wrote an XSLT stylesheet for XHTML to FO. Wish somebody try to finish it to cover the full standard.

BTW passivetex-1.25-2 had some problems to get a finished pdf.

As usual, thanks Norm, you are great.

I was wondering for months why nobody had wrote an XSLT stylesheet for XHTML to FO. Wish somebody try to finish it to cover the full standard.

Antenna House have had one for ages (years?) It might be interesting to compare that with Norm's tuned one on this particular document....

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xhtml2fo

Here is another excellent article that was very useful to me when trying to devise a mostly XHTML - to - FO transformer stylesheet: HTML to Formatting Objects (FO) conversion guide, by Doug Tidwell.

I found this tool (http://www.re.be/css2xslfo/) on the net to convert XHTML witch CSS to PDF. Are there any other easy ways to print a XHTML document to paper?

Wonderful article. You should find out if you can get it printed an official essay somewhere! And @Boda: Do you know of any other tools by which you can convert XML to PDF files?