Lars Moastuen wrote:

> We are currently working on a module that uses XLST to transform XML to  
> HTML and PDF. Since we want to minimize the time used to maintain the  
> XSLTs, we are hoping there is a way of just using one XSLT for the 
> actual  output, and maybe some routine to create PDF from the output 
> created by  the XLST, for example one XSLT that creates HTML from the 
> XML, and another  XLST that creates XSL-FO from that HTML. I know this 
> is possible, but is  this considered a good solution?

Making XSL-FO from HTML you can get really poor XSL-FO. XSL-FO is quite 
different language, not to mention it's much richer than HTML. I'd have 
different stylesheets, that's traditional way and it's proved to work 
fine. But if you don't need all power of XSL-FO, but only 
HTML-compatible subset - why not?

> Another issue we are dealing with are CSS. In the HTML output we use 
> CSS,  is there a way of using the CSS information when creating XSL-FO 
> output?  Or must the formatting be hardcoded in the XSLT creating the 
> XSL-FO?

You can have external XSLT stylesheet or just plain XML to define 
styles, just as in CSS and then apply it when producing XSL-FO. XSLT has 
xsl:attribute-set instruction to facilitate that.

> Is there anything else we should take a look at?

It's feasible also to parse CSS and convert it to XML.

-- 
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP]
http://blog.tkachenko.com