The XmlFormatter Service allows you to format an XML file as a PDF document. This page allows you to enter an XML document and an XSL stylesheet as text; these will then be passed to the XmlFormatter Service, and a PDF document will be returned to the browser.

In the current version you may experience problems with some browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, which may ignore the application/pdf MIME type and decide to display the document in another application such as FrontPage, instead of Adobe Acrobat. In this case, simply save the file with the extension .pdf, and open it manually.

The XmlFormatter Service itself is a Java-based web service (view WSDL) that uses the Apache FOP XSL-FO processor to generate PDF documents dynamically from XML documents by applying XSL stylesheets. For information about the format required for the XSL stylesheet, please consult the FOP documentation (an article about XSL-FO will appear on this site in due course).

Click here for a demonstration.