bpgead2pdf is a small program to transform EAD that complies with the Yale University Best Practice Guidelines to a PDF version using our stylesheets.
After some back of the napkin calculations, it's clear that Saxon is faster and less resource-intensive than Xalan, and that this application itself is not necessary as we can use Saxon's TransformerFactor implementation from within fop itself (see this Gist for a shell script solution).
To build, you'll need Ant. All the program's other dependencies are included. Run the following to build:
$ ant jar
To run:
$ java -jar bpgead2pdf.jar <inputfile.xml>
For example:
$ java -jar bpgead2pdf.jar mssa.ms.1746.xml
The PDF file generated will be placed in the "out" subdirectory.
The application may not resolve the required font for the stylesheet (Arial Unicode MS) on certain platforms.