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Reference

Initializing a new document

The actual PDF document is in this package represented by the FoDocument class. You can create a new instance of it as:

// Initialize a new document
FoDocument document = new FoDocument();

If you're using IBEX for generating the PDF, you can also specify a number of extra properties on the document:

document.Properties = new IbexProperties {
    Author = "Me",
    Title = "Test PDF document",
    Subject = "Test PDF document",
    Creator = "Skybrud.Pdf",
    Keywords = new []{ "hello", "world" }
};

Master pages

As part of setting up a new document, you should also add at least one master page. A master page can be thought of as a template for your pages. You can add as many master pages as you need.

XSL-FO supports a few different master page types, but fo:simple-master-page is probably the only one you'll ever need.

For the master page, you specify a name as the width of the height of the page. For instance in the example below, I've created a new master page for an A4 portrait format. The master page also defines the margins of the page.

// Initialize the "Master" master page
FoSimpleMasterPage master = new FoSimpleMasterPage("Master", "210mm", "297mm") {
    MarginTop = "1cm",
    MarginBottom = "0.5cm",
    MarginRight = "1.8cm",
    MarginLeft = "1.8cm"
};

// Add the master page to the document
document.LayoutMasterSet.Add(master);

Regions

A fo:simple-master-page consists of one or more regions. Your master page should at least have a "body" region, which is used for the main content of each page. But you can also define before and after regions which can be used for headers and footer respectively. When adding content, you can refer to a region by it's name.

// Add a new fo:region-body (required)
master.Regions.Add(new FoRegionBody {
    MarginTop = "1cm",
    MarginBottom = "0cm"
});

// Add a new fo:region-before (optional)
master.Regions.Add(new FoRegionBefore {
    RegionName = "header",
    Extent = "0cm",
    MarginBottom = "35px"
});

// Add a new fo:region-after (optional)
master.Regions.Add(new FoRegionAfter {
    RegionName = "footer",
    Extent = "35px",
});

You can use the MarginTop, MarginBottom and Extent properties to control the size of each region.

Page sequences

To add any content to the PDF document, you must add one or more page sequences (as fo:page-sequence elements). A page sequence is based on a master page, so pages in a given page sequence follows the size of it's master page.

Flows

In XSL-FO you don't actually add individual pages - instead you add content to a fo:flow element, which represents the main content of the pages. Setting up both the fo:page-sequence and fo:flow elements could look like this:

// Initialize a new flow based on the body region
flow = new FoFlow("xsl-region-body");

// Initialize a new page based on the flow
FoPageSequence page = new FoPageSequence("Master", "Master", flow);

// Append the page sequence to the document
document.PageSequences.Add(page);

Static content

The fo:region-before element can serve as the header of your pages, and as such you can add it to your page sequence like:

// Initialize a new static content for the header (before region)
FoStaticContent header = new FoStaticContent("header");
page.StaticContent.Add(header);

On the other hand, the fo:region-after element represents can serve as the footer of your pages:

// Initialize a new static content for the footer (after region)
FoStaticContent footer = new FoStaticContent("footer");
page.StaticContent.Add(footer);

In both cases, the argument for the FoStaticContent constructor refers to the names you specified for your regions of the master page.

Content

Once you have configured a page sequence, you can start adding content to either it's fo:flow element or one of the fo:static-content elements representing a region.

Typically your would start out with either a fo:block-container element or a fo:block element:

flow.Add(new FoBlock("Hello World"));

Lists

You can create lists using the fo:list-block element for the entire list, and fo:list-item elements for each item. The fo:list-item element then consists of one fo:list-item-label element and one fo:list-item-body element:

// Create a new list block
FoListBlock list = new FoListBlock();
parent.Add(list);

// Iterate through each item
foreach (var item in items) {

    // Initialize a new list item
    FoListItem li = new FoListItem {
        Label = new FoListItemLabel(),
        Body = new FoListItemBody()
    };

    // Add the list item to the list block
    list.Add(li);

}

You can add any content you wish to both the fo:list-item-label the fo:list-item-body. For the label, it would typically be sufficient to just add a hypen or similar:

// Use a simple hyphen for the label
li.Label.Add(new FoBlock("-"));

You could also create your own int variable in C# and then increment it for each item to create a numbered list instead. For the item body, we could add a new fo:block with the name of the item, and show it in bold:

li.Body.Add(new FoBlock(feature.FeatureName) {
    FontWeight = FoFontWeight.Bold
});