XSL with BI Publisher

You might have heard a fair number of rather disparaging comments concerning XSL. While it is certainly not the most beautifully designed markup language, it is far less cumbersome than many think. One of the culprits of its bad reputation might very well be its lack of enforcement of a rigid structure and strict coding principles. It is, therefore, up to the programmer to create a set of sensible rules framing the development & design of XSL style sheets.

This book documents best practices, workarounds, hacks and general knowledge & advice accumulated when creating XSL style sheets. It is biased towards Oracle's BI Publisher since that was the processor of choice at the time of writing.

This tutorial makes the assumption that you are at least remotely familiar with some markup language such as HTML, XML or TeX. Also, it presumes that when you see a tag called <fo:page-number />, your gut instinct kicks in concluding that it, in all probability, denotes a page number.