Re: [xsl] Simple Word Wrap?

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2007-09-28 13:43 -0500, Luke Jones wrote:
> I have a somewhat unique problem.  I'm converting legal xml documents
> into pdfs and I've run into a big of a snag.

Actually, this shows up with long URI strings quite often.  I have it 
in many of my production XSL-FO stylesheets.

> In one particular document, I'm dealing with drugs.  So I have "words"
> that look like
> "N-(3-methyl-1-(2-phenylethyl)-4-piperidly)-N-phenylpropanamide".  Since
> the block area I'm working in needs to be justified text, you might see
> where "words" of that length cause many aesthetic issues within the pdf.
> I've tried to go in manually and enter spaces where I felt a word wrap
> should take place.  However, due to the nature of how justification is
> handled is xsl, this doesn't seem to be a viable option as I'm still
> left with rather large gaps between words.
>
> Does anyone know of a way to keep my justification as well as manage
> words so as to keep the flow of text consistent throughout the document?

By injecting a zero-width space (​) where you want to allow a 
line break to happen.  If no line break is needed, there is no visual 
disturbance.  If a line break is needed, the line breaks at the space.

For example, you could have the following in XSLT 2.0:

  replace(replace(.,'(','​('),')',')​')

... which injects a zero-width space before each left parenthesis and 
after each right-parenthesis.

In URI strings I inject them after each slash.

The presentation treats the character as a space, but the character 
doesn't take any room on the line, thus presenting a string as if it 
were unbroken.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . . Ken

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