Re: [xsl] List of effective pages?

Subject: Re: [xsl] List of effective pages?
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:56:09 -0500
At 2011-01-15 14:43 -0800, Dan Vint wrote:
Not looking for the code or anything right now, but I need to put together a plan for a new project. I'm working in a milspec environment and they require that changes be tracked by release for when/what changed that page.

So first release everything is baseline and no problem. With subsequent minor revisions, paragraphs and such will be modified. We will track those changes with markup and a revision level. I need to maintain the original page breaks as well so that I don't get information reflowing between releases. Major additions would create a new point page as well.

The footer for these changed pages will reflect the latest change that was made and I need to produce a list of pages (a table up front) that lists every page and its current revision.

Typically this would then be produced as a change package (just the updated pages) for loose leaf publishing but they haven't required that yet.

Typically this has been done with FOSIs and either Arbortext publishing or Datalogics composer, I would like to do this with FO if possible.

XSL-FO doesn't support loose leaf publishing because there is no knowledge of page breaks from one publishing run to the next. No database of page images either.


You might make some progress with an intermediate form like XEP's, and comparing one to the next, but then I'm unclear how you would create change pages, say page 138A/B between pages 137/138 and 139/140. How would you "restart" page 139 in the following run at the exact same point where page 139 started on the previous run?

Thankfully when my customers with LEP requirements have come to me for XSL-FO they've been willing to abandon the LEP in favour of getting to use XSL-FO. In each case they were abandoning loose-leaf for complete electronic products. If you have change markup on the way in then using markers one can tell that on a given page there is changed content by adding something in the header/footer that the page has changed, but you can't preserve the page breaks that follow changed content.

If you can't convince your client to abandon loose-leaf, I think you'll have to use something other than XSL-FO.

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

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