The XSL formatting model defines a number of rectangular boxes to display output.

All output like text, pictures, etc. will be formatted into these boxes and then displayed or printed to a target media.

We will take a closer look at the following areas:

• Pages
• Regions
• Block areas
• Line areas
• Inline areas

XSL-FO output is formatted into pages. Printed output will normally go into many separate pages. Browser output will often go into one long page.

XSL-FO Pages contain Regions.
 

• region-body (body of the page)
• region-before (header of the page)
• region-after (footer of the page)
• region-start (left sidebar)
• region-end (right sidebar)

XSL-FO Block areas define small block elements like tables,paragraphs and lists.

XSL-FO Block areas can contain other Block areas,but mainly they contain Line areas.

 

Inside Block areas, XSL-FO Line areas define text lines.

It contain's Inline areas.

XSL-FO Inline areas define text inside Lines ( graphics, bullets, single character and more).