Fabio Giannetti of HP has written FOA, a Java-based authoring tool specifically for creating documents with XSL formatting objects.

According to Giannetti, FOA "helps you with pagination, page sequences and creates the transformation elements to convert multiple XML content files into XSL-FO." FOA generates XSLT stylesheets to style XML documents into XSL-FO, without the user having to write XSLT or XSL-FO.

Features of this first version include:

• Pagination
  • page (size and margins)
  • header, footer, left side, right side (size, margins, borders, backgrounds, paddings, orientation)
  • body ( size, multicolumn, margins, borders, backgrounds, paddings, orientation)
• Page Sequences
  • simple, repeated (with first and/or last), alternating (with first and/or last)
• Bricks (transformation units)
  • blocks, inline sequences, external images, external links, internal links (requires ID)
  • lists (ordered, unordered, label and body, item+label+body
• FO Properties
  • common font properties
  • common color properties
  • common border, padding and background properties
  • most important specific properties (keeps, breaks, spacing and alignment)

FOA can be downloaded from HP Labs' web site. A tutorial is also available.