Re: New Year. Renewed activity? New Chair?

On 07/02/2013 20:48, G. Ken Holman wrote:

> Or, you say declaratively, "this chunk of text is to be rendered
> within the following dimensions" (which isn't (yet) in XSL-FO).  Why
> does the creator of the XSL-FO have to be worried about the possible
> ways this is done?  If there are multiple ways this could be done,
> then parameterize the ways as properties of the intention to keep
> the text within the dimensions.  Then the renderer knows all of the
> characteristics of the author's intent with the block of text.  One
> of those properties would give the formatter constraints to play
> with the font size.

FO only gives so many fixed (parametrised) layouts I don't think you
can say (which is I think What Patrick says in (lua)tex). Here is a
database dump of hundreds of text fragments, arrange them in a suitable
order to avoid bad page breaks and typeset the result. Obviously if you
are typesetting a text book, that isn't the kind of layout requiremt you
want, but it's not exactly uncommon either.


> Perhaps your ideas could be incorporated in a new processing model,

well of course it's an old model, I think the lack of feedback from the
renderer is the main issue anyone coming from TeX or or a TeX-like
system faces when looking at XSL-FO. It looks very much like TeX in its
page layout description and marks etc, except the inability to measure
typeset text makes it seem like working with both hands tied behind your
back at times. Page references/table of contents/indices are another
kind of feedback that is (or was last time I looked) hard to control.

That's not to say that FO should incorporate all the features of TeX,
there are some disadvantages to its "slightly" idiosyncratic programming
model, but

Received on Thursday, 7 February 2013 22:02:19 UTC