Antenna House Formatter
Commercial publishing formatter that lays out XSL-FO or CSS into print-quality PDF.
Jobs Convert
Operated by Antenna House, Inc.
Opens the vendor's own site.
Jobs covered
Open a task to see exactly what the vendor documentation supports.
Where your files are processed
No server involved
Installed software on Windows, Linux or macOS, or the vendor's Docker image in your own container. Antenna House operates no document processing service in that path. That is a property of the library itself: what an application built with it does with your file depends on that application, not on this.
Software you install and run, on Windows, Linux or macOS, or as the vendor's Docker image in your own container. Antenna House operates no document processing service in that path.
What it does
Formatter is a commercial typesetting engine for documents that have to be published rather than merely printed: it takes XSL-FO or CSS and lays out pages with the control that technical documentation and standards publishing need - footnotes, cross-references, running heads, indexes, right-to-left scripts and mathematical markup. It comes in a full and a Lite edition with add-ons, runs on Windows, Linux and macOS including ARM, and is available as a Docker image.
The vendor has been selling it for two decades and names documentation groups among its users.
Best for
Organisations producing large technical documentation sets or standards from XML or HTML - where the output has to be consistent across thousands of pages, and where MathML, bidirectional text or CJK typography are requirements rather than edge cases. It is the commercial counterpart to Apache FOP in the same niche.
Worth knowing
It is a commercial product whose price comes from a quotation rather than a published figure, so the cost cannot be compared from the website. Two structural decisions matter more than the headline.
The first is the edition: the PDF output guide marks tagged PDF and PDF/UA as unavailable in the Lite edition, so a purchase aimed at accessible output has to be the full one, and an accessible-output licence does not certify any particular document. The second is how it is driven: the command line is one route among several, and the current documentation also covers Java, .NET, COM and C or C++ interfaces, with version and platform qualifications attached to each.
Details, and where each comes from
Vendor statements, our own reading of their pages, and the things nobody has established yet, each answered separately. Where we have not confirmed something it says so rather than guessing, and a row nobody has established is greyed out.
- Versions covered
- Windows · Linux · macOS · Self-hosted
- Website
- antennahouse.com
- Requires an account
- Not applicable
- Free tier
- No
- Watermark on trial output
- Not verified
- Maximum file size
- Not verified
- Batch processing
- Yes
- Data residency
- Self-hosted
- Open source
- No
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Licence
-
Commercial
Commercial; a full edition, a Lite edition and separately licensed add-ons, with pricing quoted
- Redaction
- No redaction feature
- Programmatic access
- Command line · Embeddable library
- Last availability check
- Responded in 334 ms 21 October 2026
Checked automatically by our own runner, not reported by the vendor. 100% of our last 30 checks got a response.
What the redaction verdict rests on
From the vendor's own documentation, read 22 September 2026. Not tested by us.
What that does not establish
Recorded as `none` on absence and structurally: the product formats documents into PDF from XSL-FO or CSS and does not open an existing PDF, so there is no document for a redaction feature to act on. What it does not establish: that the output is safe, and there is a nuance for a publishing formatter specifically - it renders whatever the source data contains, and a documentation pipeline that pulls in content assembled from several sources is a place where an unintended field can reach print.
What the vendor says
Claims are labelled rather than repeated as fact. Where we have checked something ourselves, it says so and shows when. Checked means we read the vendor's own page and it says what we recorded - not that we tested the behaviour, unless the note says we did.
-
“Format with XSL-FO or CSS.”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 1 October 2026
Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01.
This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.
Standing: Not re-read against the live source
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 8d1cee349291bc7f99753bee1d0821d9f9d13de66ccdb6e31c530f25898e41e3
How we checked
Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.
-
“Celebrating 21 Years of Formatter!”
Checked by us - the source says this Read 1 October 2026
Confirmed. The quoted text appears in the rendered page as read on 2026-10-01.
This claim was carried as reported rather than checked until this read.
Standing: Not re-read against the live source
Check it yourself: the source, the SHA-256, and how we checked
- From
- the text a browser renders
- SHA-256
- 8d1cee349291bc7f99753bee1d0821d9f9d13de66ccdb6e31c530f25898e41e3
How we checked
Read as rendered text in headless Chrome on 2026-10-01 and saved to the evidence archive, so the read can be repeated against the same file. Comparison ignores case, punctuation and hyphenation, which is why "open-source" on the record matches "open source" on the page.
Each claim is quoted from the vendor's own pages. This section describes what we have and have not checked - it is not a judgement about anyone.
Sponsorship is distribution, not an endorsement or a promise of search rankings, AI citations, traffic, or sales. This listing is a free entry, compiled from published sources.
Related reading
- Which PDF tools keep your file on your machine - what we count as processing on your own device.