foActive™ focuses on creating applications that enable and enhance the use of XSL Formatting Objects (XSL FO) for dynamic PDF and print applications. Our goal is to put together a "toolkit" of various components that can be used for a wide-variety of customer applications.

Our first product, <X>Styler™, is a plug-in to Microsoft Word 2003 Professional that delivers on this promise. To the end user, <X>Styler is simply a new Word toolbar that allows you to insert tags from an XML schema into a document and then generate an XSL template to use for merging data into documents without using any Word functions. The <X>Styler XSL templates can be used to generate new Word documents as well as XSL FO by merging content from XML streams. And of course, once you have XSL FO, you can publish this content using a XSL FO processor.

We have also started the Beta program for fo:Factory™. This product is a complete Windows-based GUI for constructing and performing high volume batch print production. fo:Factory is based on the RenderX XEPWin XSL FO processor. It provides for identification of data sources, relating those sources to XSL conversion(s) and output of various document formats leveraging all the capabilities of RenderX® XEPWin. fo:Factory also provides several extended capabilities like concatenation of output, reorganization of bookmarks, application of barcodes and watermarks, and saving complete XML-based instruction sets for scheduling off-line conversions.

foActive has also developed our first of many web services for websites as well as XSL FO and SVG users. Our barcode web service allows you to insert various barcodes into documents. For our XSL FO users, you can insert these barcodes by using a simple URL in a <fo:external-graphic>. As long as you have web access, the barcode is generated server side in SVG and delivered directly to your running XSL FO processor.

We have many more products and services on the drawing board so take a look and check back often.