Re: xsl-fo first anniversary

>  Is 'the rest of the page from here on in' a viable measurement
> at rendering time?

not directly in TeX as the page breaker can (and does) look ahead to decide
what to put on a page so there isn't really a definite notion of "here".
However you can do a certain amount (for example you can find out how
much of the page has already been comitted which gives you an upper
bound on the anount of space you've got left.

alternatively (and commonly in TeX) you get into the black art of 
surrounding your object with penalties (ie keep-together  hints in fo
speak) which can influence whether the page breaker decides to insert an
object or not on the page. But I wouldn't like to see FO go down that
route as it is inherently specific to one particular page breaking
algorithm. (Not a particularly good one at that, TeX's line breaker is
much better than its page breaker)

However I do think that some kind of box/measurement model could fit
with FO. from the xslt side of things you typeset a selection of
areas and place them in some new format-time choose statement that
allows you to select one of the versions depending on criteria such as
the size of the final boxes or (as available in TeX) some measure of how
"well" the text fitted the various areas, eg if there's loads of underful
lines in one layout, choose a different one.


David


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Received on Friday, 18 October 2002 13:13:33 UTC