If you are new in this area you can also use a visual design tool. I found the XSL-FO Designer from Ecrion to be good for both programmers familiar with XSLT and XSL-FO and old ladies that need to make changes to the templates (we are deploying a desktop solution based on XSL-FO that replaces an older proprietary solution and the ladies can make small changes to the document templates :) ).
FOP is indeed not maintained anymore, but the commercial vendors are doing a great job at providing faster and quite affordable solutions and the set of features is growing with every release (a 2.0 draft of the XSL-FO specifications is now in the works!).
