help decreasing .fo size

[Colin Savage <CS...@RUBICO.COM>]

I am creating a report-style listing of about 1500 rows with 5 columns per
row. The biggest problem I have is the size of the fo doc. My source xml doc
is about 700kb, but when I create the xsl fo doc it is more than 5mb. I am
using tables to do the listing; looking at the amount of characters to
create rows and cells:

<fo:table-cell><fo:block></fo:block></fo:table-cell> = 52 char
<fo:table-row></fo:table-row> = 29 char

for a table with 5 columns
29 + (5 x 52) = 289 char

assuming each cell has 10 characters of data this increases to 29 + (5 x (52
+ 10)) = 339 char/row

adding font-size to fo:block ( font-size="8pt") adds another 16 char
29 + (5 x (52 + 10 + 16)) = 419 char/row

Is there less verbose way to create a table?