Re: (dsssl) overlapping table cells

["Paul Tyson" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "SKV" <skvenkat@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <DSSSList@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 11:36 PM
Subject: (dsssl) overlapping table cells


> Hi,
>
> I am wondering (for sometime now) how this Elsevier SGML "cspan"
(column
> span) attribute can be implemented.
>
> Old archives in the biglist tells you to do this:
>
> (element c
>     (make table-cell
> n-columns-spanned: (string->number (attribute-string "cspan"))
>   ) )
>
> This doesn't work in this case since we have overlapping elements...
>
> <r><c cspan="2">Entry 1</c><c></c></r>
> <r><c>1.0</c><c>2.0</c></r>
>
> What we need is more like merge cells...
>

The easiest way is probably to suppress processing of cells following a
cell with a cspan attribute.

Something like this should work:
(element c
    (if ( preceding c has cspan > 1 )
        (empty-sosofo)
        (make table-cell ...)))

You must make a procedure for "preceding c has cspan > 1" that is
general enough to deal with your data.  If you have a variable number of
columns, and any cell can span any number of columns, you could make a
procedure that takes a node-list argument (consisting of the preceding
cells), and returns #t or #f depending on whether a span is still in
effect at the current cell.

Another approach would be to handle cell processing at the row level,
using modes or (process-node-list).  Then you could select which cells
to process.  In this case the (element row) procedure wouldn't do
(process-children).

Hope this helps.

--Paul

Paul Tyson, Principal Consultant                   Precision Documents
paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx              http://precisiondocuments.com
     "The art and science of document engineering."

> Thanks
>
> SKV
> TnQ Books and Journals
>



 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist