如何编写XSL文件将给定XML内容生成PDF表格？

Hey there! Let's figure out how to convert your XML into a proper PDF table. Directly transforming XML to PDF with plain XSL isn't feasible—instead, we'll use XSLT to convert your XML to XSL-FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects), then use an FO processor to render that into a PDF. Here's a step-by-step solution:

Step 1: Understand the Conversion Pipeline #

The process works like this:

• Your source XML → XSLT stylesheet → XSL-FO document → FO processor (e.g., Apache FOP) → Final PDF

Step 2: Write the XSLT Stylesheet #

Your XML has <p> elements in the XHTML namespace, so we need to declare that namespace in our XSLT to properly target those elements. Here's a complete stylesheet that turns your three <item> entries into a single table row (you can adjust this if you need a different table structure):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">

    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

    <!-- Root template -->
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <fo:root>
            <!-- Define page layout -->
            <fo:layout-master-set>
                <fo:simple-page-master master-name="A4" page-width="210mm" page-height="297mm" margin="20mm">
                    <fo:region-body/>
                </fo:simple-page-master>
            </fo:layout-master-set>

            <!-- Page sequence -->
            <fo:page-sequence master-reference="A4">
                <fo:flow flow-name="xsl-region-body">
                    <!-- Table definition -->
                    <fo:table border="1pt solid black" table-layout="fixed" width="100%">
                        <fo:table-body>
                            <fo:table-row>
                                <!-- Process each item into a table cell -->
                                <xsl:apply-templates select="values/item"/>
                            </fo:table-row>
                        </fo:table-body>
                    </fo:table>
                </fo:flow>
            </fo:page-sequence>
        </fo:root>
    </xsl:template>

    <!-- Template for each item: extract the XHTML p text -->
    <xsl:template match="item">
        <fo:table-cell padding="8pt" text-align="center">
            <fo:block font-size="12pt">
                <xsl:value-of select="html/xhtml:p"/>
            </fo:block>
        </fo:table-cell>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Key Notes on This Stylesheet: #

• We declare the xhtml namespace to access the <p> elements (since they're in http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml). This is a common gotcha—if you skip this, the XSLT won't find your text content.
• The XSL-FO structure defines an A4 page with a bordered table, where each <item> becomes a centered, padded table cell.
• If you need to expand this later (like adding data rows under these headers), you can easily extend the template to handle more complex XML structures.

Step 3: Generate the PDF #

To turn the XSL-FO output into a PDF, use an open-source FO processor like Apache FOP:

1. Grab Apache FOP from its official distribution (no external links needed—just search for it)
2. Save your original XML as input.xml and the XSLT above as transform.xsl
3. Run this command in your terminal:

   fop -xml input.xml -xsl transform.xsl -output output.pdf
   

This will spit out a PDF with a clean table containing your three values: Step, Description, Result.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Eronimo