One of the obstacles many users have to face when they are introduced to the production of print from XML is the page layout. Without having the proper page layout, its unlikely that the user will produce a satisfying result.
There are two vocabularies specified in separate W3C Recommendations, which provide for the two styling processes of transforming and rendering XML files.
The Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is a templating markup language used to describe how a processor should create a transformed result from XML information.
The Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) is a pagination markup language, which describes a rendering vocabulary containing the semantics of formatting information for paginated presentation.
XSLT is above all created for the kinds of transformation, which are necessary for using XSL, but it can also be used for arbitrary transformation requirements.
What is necessary to get to a PDF document ready for printing created from your XML document? First, the XML must be transferred to an XSLT processor with an appropriate stylesheet in order to produce another XML document. This uses the XSL-FO namespace and is intended for an XSL-FO formatter. The second stage is to put the output of the first stage into the XSL-FO formatter, which then produces the end product: a visually good-looking document ready to be printed.
The advantage of this process is that the XML source document is still neutral concerning formats and may be used with other XSLT stylesheets for the production of other media.