I followed my own instructions in the earlier post to set up FOP font configuration on the actual IALLT Journal site, and then started putting test transformations in place. I took some basic PDF attribute sets from ScanCan, and modified them heavily, primarily by converting the metric setup to inches as required by the IALLT Journal (paper size will be 8.5 x 11), and simplifying the page masters; IALLT requires only three page masters, one a recto for the article title page, then one each for recto and verso regular pages. I set up the headers and footers in a default manner, with the running titles as provided in the articles, and put page numbering at the bottom outside. Amazingly, the basics worked right out of the box; FOP is perhaps further advanced than we thought.

The next stages are:

1. Decide which components of the layout and design should be abstracted for editorial control, and stored in the db. Make that work.
2. Create the styleguide-controlled transformation system. Right now, the transformation is done using a root XSLT file, but actually a styleguide-based file should be called, as with the XHTML transformation, and the base file included in that.
3. Add the article header system into the basic templates file (this is not styleguide-controlled).
4. Create a blank pdf_references.xsl file in the styleguide folder, and include it. Later, the XHTML references document will act as the model to create this file.
5. Look at the way images are included in the XML, and make sure you have a reliable method of deriving the hard path to image files just in the way we handle fonts; FOP can't work with relative paths.

Then it's just a question of working through all the little templates, figuring out how best to handle them.