Re: (dsssl) Reacting to page breaks inside a paragraph

["John R. Sheets" <dusk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 09, 2001, jany.quintard@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, John R. Sheets wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm putting together a simple DTD and stylesheets for screenwriting,
> > .../... 
> > However, if a page break splits the dialogue, I need to be able to
> > insert the name again as a header on the following page:
> > 
> >                 JOE
> >     As I was saying, the best way
> >     to strip the bark off without
> >     breaking it into uneven pieces 
> > -----PAGE BREAK-----
> >             JOE (cont'd)
> >     is to first separate it from the
> >     wood by smacking it with a 
> 
> A (quite simple and not very smart) method would be to build a table for
> each <dialogue> and use the <name> as header. Something like:

Aside from how "smart" it is, I don't see any other way to do it,
except to decompose the node into flat text and process it manually.
That's what I did for my ASCII output stylesheet, except I could never
get it to do any processing on child nodes.

>   (element dialogue
>     (make table table-border: #f
>       (make table-part content-map: '((name header)
>                                       (speech #f))
>     table-part-omit-middle-header?: #f))) ;; to repeat header on each page

I _finally_ got around to fiddling with this over the weekend, and
sort of got it working.  At least in principle.  The problem is that
the content that I want to break across page boundaries is always
contained in a single <speech> element, which means that it always
ends up in a single table-cell.

Is it possible to decompose a paragraph flow object into line-field
flow objects, and then stick each line into a separate row/cell?  If I
could do that, all my problems would be solved.  Or is line wrapping
handled by the backend, and thus out of reach of DSSSL?

Or alternatively, can I force a single multi-line table-cell to break
at the page boundaries?  Currently, it forces the cell to the next
page if it doesn't all fit on the current page.

I tried setting the n-rows-spanned property of the table-cell, but
that didn't quite work.  For example, when I set it to 3, the tex
backend allocated space for 1/3 of the content (as I expected);
unfortunately, the other 2/3 of the content overlapped the text
immediately following the table.  Maybe I didn't set it all up
correctly...I did a lot of half-blind fiddling.  (c;

Thanks,
John

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