"Phantom" for fo:page-sequence's

Hi!

I'm using the XSL to create some documents with
complex requirements to the page numbering.
E.g. document consists of several parts, each of them
is numbered starting from 1 in a form
"page_number"/"number_of_pages". Each part consists of
one or more sections with different requirements to
the page margins. All these can be implemented by
means of different fo:page-sequence's and there is no
problem with XSL so far.

However, there is a requirement to produces separate
files with excerpts of section keeping page numbering
of original document. To produce such excerpts, I'm
also using the stylesheet, however, I cannot keep
original page numbering.
To be more precise, if document consists of one part
with two sections, and I need to extract each section
into a separate file I got two problems:
1) I cannot correctly count number of pages for the
first file, since it does not take into account number
of pages of the second section.
2) I cannot correctly start page numbering in the
second file, since I do not know number of pages in
the first file.

At the momement I see two alternatives:
a) Do not use stylesheet to produce excerpts, but
extract them directly from file. In this case I need
to know correct starting page and number of pages to
extract. This information can be returned if I would
modify an XSL engine (FOP in my case).
b) Introduce phantom attribute to fo:page-sequence,
that will tell XSL engine count this pages in page
numbering but do not produce into result file.
Both of this approaches require modification of the
XSL engine, but I prefer the second option as more
general.

There are two question to the community:
1) Is there any way to solve mentioned above problems
by means of the any either XSL 1.0 or 1.1?
2) Could XSL workgroup consider the possibility to add
a-la "phantom" attribute to the XSL specification?

Best regards,
Gennadiy Tsarenkov

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Received on Saturday, 25 February 2006 07:55:05 UTC