Re: CSS Pages and Pagination and Transitions (was: Prioritisation)

On 8/5/15, 2:40 PM, "Daniel Glazman" <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote:



>Whatever is a page, CSS are going to be used to count them. 

While that may be true in some cases, I don’t see this as an absolute.  I can think of a number of situations - outside the web context, but using OWP technologies - where the page count has nothing to do with the CSS.  Clearly, any such solution needs to be compatible with the web context, but not necessary bound by it.


>Since the whole thing smells, looks and
>feels like generated content, the natural host for this is
>probably CSS, even if I agree we're slightly leaving the field of
>pure styling to reach higher-level features.

Not sure what you mean by the term “generated content” in this context, but it’s that last bit which to me is key.  These are “higher level features” that are about both semantics and styling/layout - and I think that is what is causing the head scratching…


>I'm all in favor of it. We have been sitting on these features
>for far too long and I prefer having them in CSS even they not
>entirely belong there rather than arguing forever again about where it
>should land.

Depends on what problem(s) we are trying to solve.  See the many earlier discussions and points in this thread for the myriad of problems in this space that need resolution…


>There is some resistance to changes there, again often for quite
>bad reasons. With other concepts like Templates, Regions, Shapes
>and Exclusions we could certainly specify much more powerful - and even
>simpler - page models.

I think all of those things are wonderful, but I don’t think they are the solutions to all the problems.  To a few of them - yes - but not all (and maybe not even the majority).   So yes, seeing them implemented would be a huge step forward.  We (Adobe) tried by contributing code but we can only take things so far when others control the final deliverables.


>I'd like to add one bit about pagination and in particular transitions
>between pages: I said it multiple times in CSS WG meetings and W3C
>TPAC, we really need a spec there. I recommend you read the thread
>starting at [1] if you have not seen it before.

Transitions are indeed something to be considered - good point!  They have been part of PDF since 1.1 (1996) and have evolved to address not only page->page transitions but also sub-page transitions.  Having the same model for both concepts has been a huge implementation savings.

I’ve enclosed the relevant parts of ISO 32000-1:2008 (aka the PDF standard) for reference/background…


Leonard