Re: foo ... bar Re: Q: XML+XSL transforms to a print-ready format

["Sebastian Rahtz" <sebastian.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Liam R. E. Quin writes:

 > XSL has come a long way since then, but it was never really page-oriented.

um, so whats it for, then? if you trim it down to basics, you might as 
well use CSS and Netscape's formatting engine.

 > Automatic running headers, cross references
 > (see Figure 5.1 "black socks" on page 521, upper right),
 > smart cross references (see Figure 3, opposite page),
not sure about "upper right", but I would hope that the "opposite
page" could be achieved in XSL.

 > sorting an index with page numbers included, footnotes that don't
 > quite fit on the same page as the reference, table headers that repeat
 > on subsequent pages, with automatically generated column heading text,
 > and a table footer that says "page 3 of 5" or "continued", feathering
 > and vertical balancing of columns, text wrapping around non-erctangular
 > shapes, text on a path of lines and splies/curves, the list goes on and on.

up to "feathering", can I have all those, please? :-}

but I am not sure what you are saying. is it:

 a) XSL FO was not designed for specifying traditional book or journal 
    typesetting
 b) These things are _hard_ to specify, so wait for XSL FO 2.0
 c) It is intrinsically impossible to write a style specification
    language, unless the style engine has communication with
    the typesetting engine (as TeX does)

?

on the whole, I'd agree with c) :-} (taking as my example the case
where a table caption is formatting differently depending on whether
or not it fits on one line, which needs access to the typeset result)

Sebastian


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