We are pleased to make available these resources free for public use, provided on an "AS IS" basis without formal support or warranty of any kind.

We would appreciate any feedback you have, or suggestions for changes and improvements; please forward your comments to info@CraneSoftwrights.com.

A summary of all resources is available in date order for quick reference, in addition to an  RSS XML  file.

1. Printing and displaying UBL 2.0 instances to the UN Layout Key

This is a library for displaying and printing instances of UBL 2.0 document models to HTML files and PDF files according to the United Nations Layout Key. The ZIP file includes all of the documentation required to obtain and, where necessary, install freely-available third-party software on your machine to do the rendering and printing.

This library supports the completed formatting specifications from the UBL HISC committee. At this time only the Invoice has been completed, thus it is the only one supported. If you can contribute to the work of the committee, the committee home page has details of how you can help.

A number of different languages are available for the box labels on the forms implemented by Crane: Bosnian (PDF/HTML), Czech (PDF/HTML), Danish (PDF/HTML), Dutch (PDF/HTML), English (PDF/HTML), Finnish (PDF/HTML), French (PDF/HTML), German (PDF/HTML), Icelandic (PDF/HTML), Italian (PDF/HTML), Norwegian (PDF/HTML), Portuguese (PDF/HTML), Slovak (PDF/HTML) and Spanish (PDF/HTML) are supported at this time. If you can contribute to Crane's library with a set of translations of box labels for another language, the ZIP file has the details of how you can do so. We will make all of the UN Layout Key stylesheets on our web site freely available, thus your community of users will end up with a free UBL 2 to UN Layout Key PDF printing for download.

This environment is based on XSLT and XSL-FO, but users don't need to know these details to use the stylesheets.

1.1. Commercial XSL-FO engine library support

If you are using the library to create PDF files, these XSLT/XSL-FO stylesheets work with all conforming XSL-FO engines to produce PDF and other printable results. If you do not have your own conforming XSL-FO engine, the following suppliers have made special accommodations for these stylesheets.

When using the Ibex engine (version 4.7.2.7 or later) to create the PDF file, these stylesheets will embed the input XML document into the PDF XMP metadata in clear text. This package is delivered with a copy of Crane's XMP Metadata file extraction package in order to recreate the input XML from the clear text embedded in the PDF file.

Supplier: Visual Programming Ltd. Accommodation: Crane's library includes a digitally-signed manifest for using the Ibex XSL-FO engine to produce PDF results in the commercial mode without fees. See the library documentation for details on invocation. Download: The "Ibex Signature Edition" engine configured for Crane's stylesheets is available as a free download from the "Downloads" page linked from the Visual Programming Ltd. web site http://www.xmlpdf.com/ibex-downloads-signed.html. Updated: February 3, 2011 - version 4.7.2.7

2. UBL codex stylesheets

Crane's UBL instance visualization stylesheets are used for diagnostic and reporting purposes to expose the content of a UBL instance in manners that do not appear as XML syntax.

3. Printing and displaying legacy UBL 1.0 instances

3.1. Printing legacy UBL 1.0 instances

At this time the UBL 1.0 printing environment is not being maintained. If you need to print UBL 1.0 instances according to the UN Layout Key, please contact us and tell us of your requirement.

3.2. Displaying legacy UBL 1.0 instances

For JAVA users: This stylesheet library is available in JAVA ".jar" form as a precompiled small-footprint high-performance ready-to-use module for transforming direct from UBL XML to HTML and to XSL-FO for use in an XSL-FO engine. Please see the Ambrosoft, Inc. web site for details.

4. UN Layout Key for non-UBL documents

This is a modular collection of importable stylesheets fragments for the presentation of fields of information according to the United Nations Layout Key. The Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) vocabulary is used to present the layout semantics.

A revision to this library is already included in the UBL package noted above, so there is no need to also download this as well as the UBL library.

Important note: this modular library is not sufficient on its own for transforming instances of any vocabulary, as these stylesheets are meant to be imported by vocabulary-aware stylesheets that understand the mapping of information to fields on the UN forms.