RE: Future of DSSSL: What about PDF?

Subject: RE: Future of DSSSL: What about PDF?
From: Avi Kivity <Avi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 11:54:35 +0200
On Monday, March 08, 1999 08:23, Brandon Ibach [SMTP:bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
wrote:
> the state between the rendering engine and the DSSSL engine.  So,
> what
> happens when there's *no* connection between the engines?  In other

No general-indirect, or the renderer can have its own local dsssl engine (a
little idiotic, that).

You can look at general-indirect as a fo that has a procedure-typed
characteristic.

> <higher-level sosofos>

Let's consider an example:

(define (page-reference ref-page this-page)
    (case (- ref-page this-page)
        ((0)  (literal "this page"))
        ((1)  (literal "next page"))
        ((-1) (literal "previous page"))
        (else  (literal "page " (format-number ref-page "1")))
    )
)

This can be used as an argument to general-indirect to produce the obvious
results.

If you wanted to generalize it, you would have to provide all four sosofos
as characteristics of the higher-level fo, together with instructions on how
to select them. I guess it could be done, but you are essentially encoding
the case expression in a sosofo.

Say,

(make complex-page-reference
    page-difference-flow-map: '((0) this (1) next (-1) prev)
    first-area-of-node: (element-with-id (...))
    (make sequence label: 'this (literal "this page"))
    ;etc.
)

It seems horribly non-general compared to the previous version. You would
have to add syntax for before and after (without limits on the number of
pages), sometimes the sosofos would not be computable ("n pages ago"?)

By the way, I peeked into reference-values, and they seem near relatives.
Anyone has any ideas what they are and what they are useful for?

---
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