Re: Floats, books and regions

On Tue, 2014-01-28 at 00:33 +0100, François REMY wrote:
[...]
> In other news, I'm still unable to think about any way we could
> basically extract quotations (with their formatting) from a document
> and display one of them per "page", where the displayed quotation
> appears on the current page.

Maybe with element() but that deletes the original so you have to
duplicate it in the HTML, which seems sucky (there's now a "copy"
proposal though), and unless you want the pull quote in the margin it's
going to be difficult to arrange for the text to flow around it
reliably. So yes, regions are an obvious candidate.

Also, you more often want to format a pull-quote differently than in the
main body - with different font and size and colours - while of course
retaining things like superscripts, mathml, etc.  But you might _not_
want to retain links - this sort of flexibility is an example of where
client-side transformations are useful. But first you need to get the
text out of the main flow and into the place you want the pull quote,
and have the main text flow around it (e.g. float: center).

There are some other "on the same page as" items in formatting --

* footnotes and their references

* figures and their references - figures in many publications go
  at the top of the page or column in which they're first mentioned,
  and are stacked on top of each other together with their captions,
  up to a max limit, with overflow on the bottom of the page and then
  on the next page.

* marginalia - like footnotes but should normally appear at the side,
  level with the reference, or level with the start of the paragraph
  containing the reference; marginalia stack, so if there are too many
  they generally get pushed upwards from the bottom of the page, or
  downwards from the bottom. The baseline of the first line of the
  marginalia normally aligns with the baseline of the text referring
  to it.

All of these, together with cross-references in general (see p. 3061)
can make formatters go into loops if the developers of the formatters
were not careful - even TeX can loop. The most common example is where
you format a cross-reference with a place-holder, see page 6, but you
discover eventually it's actually on page 600, and the two extra digits
push the reference onto the next page, and with enough of these
differences the reference now goes to page 603. In that case you don't
get a loop but you do need multiple passes.

A footnote reference on the last line of a page of text causes a
footnote to appear, but it's too big so we have to move it to the next
page, but now there's a gap at the bottom of the page so we fill it with
the next line of text, which contains a footnote reference...

There are also keeps, in which e.g. a heading should be on the same page
as what follows - "keep with next" - but these aren't really in the same
category.

> Some variation of regions could handle this, as stated before. 
> 

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 2014 01:12:44 UTC