The Next Stage in Composition -- McIlroy

By all accounts XSL-FO can be considered a robust system, at least for technical documents. There's very little information out there yet on what works best, and what doesn't really work.

Probably the most detailed paper around is Eliot Kimber of ISOGEN International's presentation, "Using XSL Formatting Objects for Production-Quality Document Printing," offered at XML 2002 in Baltimore. As Kimber points out, "XSL Formatting Objects have unavoidable limitations from two principal causes: missing layout features and the limitations inherent in the two-step XMLxt-pages processing model." He says also that FO is "not a full solution for index generation." (Although this is addressed in the 1.1 version recommendations.)