Re: PDF backend for (Open)Jade

[drescher@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Christof Drescher)]

Hi!

>How would you implement general-indirect-sosofo of 12.5.1.1? It 
>takes a procedure as its first argument. It is not implemented yet, 
>since no backend support it. It is, however, not that hard to do 
>when it is needed. 

Yet, that makes it not top of the "to-do-list"... :-)

>Examples include:
>- dictinary heads
>- index entries (i.e. you have a list of page numbers and you want 
>to sort them, coelesce ranges and so on)
>- "See figure 4.3 (p. 59)", where the page reference want be there 
>if the figure and the reference are on the sam page.

OK, I see. I understand the problem with the latter two, but I can 
imagine that the DSSSL processor (i.e. OpenJade) needs quite a lot of 
work for it too; at the moment (at least as I understand) it does not 
care about page numbers at all...

As you might know, handling of page numbers is a very ugly topic in 
formatting - you can have the page number fixed just after pagination, 
but pagination depends on the content, and part of the content is the 
page number as text - a vicious circle.

>I'm no JAVA guru, but would it be that hard to use the style library 
>from a java application directly (with some wrapper)?

Not directely, but it lacks a) system independence and b) needs 
thorough analysis of the functions needed (see above)...

In my opinion, we should concentrate on more interesting features 
first; for easier things (like footnote numbers, there may be simpler 
workarounds after all. At least from a Java programmer's standpoint, 
the extension to support such things later is not very difficult if the 
groundworks have been laid modularized enough.

Regards, 
Christof


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