RE: [xsl] xsl-fo header problems

Subject: RE: [xsl] xsl-fo header problems
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 09:41:09 -0400
I hope this discussion is useful for others; I'll continue with public responses.

At 2003-04-23 09:45 +0100, David.Pawson@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >I.e. not content in parents of markers?
>
> Correct.  But looking at my quote above you'll see I'm not
> talking about
> retrieval ... the markers are *associated* with the contents
> of the parent
> of the marker, hence the need for the wrapping block,
which never made sense, since an empty marker isn't much use.

I agree, but I'm not talking about empty markers. And in the diagram you'll see that the markers have children and are not empty.


> Note on the bottom of page 205 "the marker's parent's total
> area is called
> a "qualifying area", and thus the marker is associated with
> all of the
> marker's parent's areas.

Yep. Up to either page or page-sequence or document.
No problem there.

Ummmmm ... it must still be a problem because when I speak of "qualifying area" I'm not talking about page or page-sequence or document ... I'm talking about the scope encompassed by the parent of the marker. Those areas that are put into the area trees of the pages.


> The diagram on page 207 shows how each marker is the first
> child element of
> each block, and looking at the bottom areas in the area tree,
> how the areas
> produced by the parent blocks all have their respective
> markers associated
> with them.

Mmm. No you lost me there. There's no statement of the qualifying
area for the diagram, and the 3 pages?? to the left (text says 4 btw)
dont' seem to align with the tree diagram?

I think you are lost because you are missing the concept of the "qualifying area". That isn't page-oriented, it is area-oriented and is only the size of the areas of the parent of the marker. All areas in the qualifying area are associated with the marker.


Sorry Ken no. Selecting content (children of markers),
I've always associated with the transform stage, hence I've never
had hundreds of markers to choose from (or even 3 :-)
I had a real job making an example that picked an overflow area
from the previous page, but finally managed it (what a daft name,
first-including-carryover :-)  Picking content from the current
page-sequence,
I really can't see any use for it.

Running subsection heads. Look at the headers on my book and you'll see the subsection numbers ... these are rendered with the defaults "first-starting-within-page" and "page-sequence".


I've chosen content from the source document (section/chap titles etc),
but from the current page-sequence? Why might that be necessary.

(I don't have the book with me in the airport, so I'm trying to recall the details...) The chapter-wide footer is the chapter title, but the header dynamically changes to reflect the running subsection headings. There is no way to do running subsection headings at transformation time, it can only be done with markers. Only the formatter knows what content is on each page to know which marker to retrieve based on the markers found on the page, or on an earlier page up to the start of the page sequence.


Recall I mentioned in an earlier post that both of my paper-based books were published using XSL-FO from my XML sources. The running headers you see in the book were done in XSL-FO.

> Quite a classy design, I thought when I read it.  I think
> James Tauber was
> behind that one, but I'm not positive.

I like the idea of running headers,
though the syntax (and description?) could do with improvement IMO.

:{)} All the more reason to write a book on it!


Then I guess I'm missing the lecture that went behind those notes :-)

:{)} Ah, but the objective of the handouts and the book are to be useful without the lecture based on learning what in the lecture was useful to the students to know. I like to think I'm not writing these books in a vacuum, but in the context of learning what students need to learn.


Thanks, Dave ... I hope you find this continuing dialogue useful ... please let me know if I've clarified the "qualifying area" concept for you and how it is distinguished from the retrieve-boundary= choices.

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

--
Upcoming hands-on courses:   Europe (XSLT/XPath):    May  5, 2003
-                            Europe (XSL-FO):        May 16, 2003
- (XSLT/XPath and/or XSL-FO) North America:      June 16-20, 2003

G. Ken Holman                mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Crane Softwrights Ltd.         http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/
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