Report from International Workshop on the future of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL-FO) Version 2.0

General Formatting

Absolute postion, layering and positioning; Alignment of scripts and baseline shifts; Callouts; Copyfitting (e.g. reformatting with different parameters to make text fit an available area; perhaps also the ability to supply alternate content to use when the primary content cannot be made to fit); Cropping and scaling of images (non-rectangular crop; masks to bleed them out; some of this would come from SVG); Cross-references; Drop/raised cap; Hanging punctuation; Headers/Footers (e.g. continued on next page near text instead of in footer; variable-sized header and footer region to fit to content; ability to list all markers on the page); Hyphenation; Indents; Inline keeps; Justification, word and letter spacing (characters to exclude, perhaps by Unicode class, e.g. numerals; mixing scripts and controlling spacing with justification, e.g. embedded Japanese in English text with letterspacing; force justify when the line length is within a certain range; skewing; punctuation spacing, adding space around/after punctuation); Kerning, Ligatures; Leading (including feathering); Lists with control of label spacing; Marginalia

There was also discussion of JIS 4501, which is not currently available in English; a translated version may in the future be made available to participants in the XSL Working Group.

Non-rectangular areas; Rule corners/boxes/borders (specifically rounded corners); Run-arounds; Tables (Decimal alignment; Different table-header/footers depending on whether it is the first instance of the table, dpeending on page, column, etc. Splitting tables horizontally, also with a column header that is repeated. Should be a way to keep them visually next to each other depending on binding edge Repeat top row also on second page; Two tables underneath each other, have borders collapse; Side-by-side tables)

Columns, Floats, Keeps

Column balancing, floats, e.g. relative to the page; footnotes; multiple columns with arbitrary spans)

Fonts

CSS will take font-download specification out in a separate spec. This can be used now.

Use different size for characters depending on unicode range

Access to opentype features; You can access these in InDesign: e.g. Initial swash caps, Oldstyle figures.

Abstract this away from OpenType, Graphite, GX, etc.

Units of measurement

Allow people to define units; this was supported in DSSSL; Points in XSL were copied from CSS, afterwards CSS was changed Userdefined units can be done in XSLT, e.g. using XML entities.

Colour

Add device-specific CMYK color (SVG has this);

Fills/Shading/Vignettes (also in SVG)

Masks

Opacity

Mathematics

Strong desire for more MathML/mathematics support)

Multi-column layout

currently only for regions; add support for block-containers

Remaining Issues

Although Internationalization is important, it is a guiding principle and not a feature. Similarly with Accessibility. The remaining items in the original Requirements document were not discussed in detail.