Re: page breaks

[Richard Light <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In message <34BA86AF.B8B26BE2@xxxxxxxxxxx>, Scot Nesom
<scotn@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
>I have a project that is requiring the exporting of formatted documents
>(currently HTML) that need to be printed off.
>The problem is that the HTML pages are 400 pages long .
>Does XML  support page breaks ?
>This would help me in printing off multiple documents in groups instead
>of on continuous page.

XML[-Lang] doesn't deal in outputting at all: that is the province of
DSSSL, and of XSL, the (as yet unfinalized) style mechanism for XML.

If you write a DSSSL spec that uses (simple-page-sequence) flow objects,
you will get a paginated result.  You can force page breaks (for
example, at the start of each top-level division within your document)
by putting their content into a new (simple-page-sequence) flow object.

If you want to do this in an 'XML way', you can use Jade
(http://www.jclark.com/jade) in conjunction with Henry Thompson's
recently-announced xslj package (http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/xslj.html)
to write XSL style sheets which will output your XML document in a
paginated form.

(Note that you will need to use the DSSSL flow objects to get a
paginated result: XSL's HTML flow objects will generate a scrollable
object for you, and you will be back where you started, with a big HTML
'page'!  For this reason you won't be able to use Microsoft's msxsl tool
for this particular job, since it only supports XSL's HTML flow
objects.)

Richard Light.

Richard Light
SGML/XML and Museum Information Consultancy
richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist