Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: pagebreak in pdf using fop

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

Dave,

This questions's been discussed on the list and on the debian-sgml
list before, so might be good to put it into the FAQ.

Looking back at archived messages, the answer's been that you need to
use a processing instruction instead of an element (so also need to
write support in your XSLT customization layer for generating a
pagebreak in the FO output for each instance of that PI).

The suggestion from Paul Reavis on the debian-sgml list was to use
<?dbfo break-before="page"?>. Something like that would work --
there's existing (undocumented) support in the stylesheets
(dbfo-attribute template in fo/pi.xsl and dbhtml-attribute template in
html/pi.xsl) for processing PIs that start with "dbfo" and "dbhtml"
and extracting the pseudo- attributes/values from them.

So given that the question's shown up a few times, maybe it's a common
enough need that support could be added to the standard FO stylesheets
to handle <?dbfo break-before="page"?> or something similar.

As far as the rationale for the DTD not providing an element to force
pagebreaks in rendered output, it's just consistent with the fact that
the DTD by design provides markup only for modeling structure and
content, not presentation. If a pagebreak is strictly a processing
thing and has no significance to structure or content -- just
something that's specific to print delivery, not to HTML or online
help, etc. -- then not really appropriate to have an element for it.



Matthew Braun <mbraun@urbana.css.mot.com> writes:

> Dave Pawson (though possibly not the `strlen("Dave Pawson") == 11!!!' Dave)
> wrote:
> 
> >At 09:18 30/10/2001 +0900, Michael Smith wrote:
> >>I don't think <beginpage/> is intended to be used as a way to force
> >>pagebreaks in rendered output. I think it's supposed to be a way of
> >>indicating where a pagebreaks was in some previous printed version of
> >>whatever content it is you're marking up. So though it's not implemented
> >>in the stylesheets, even if it were implemented, it definitely wouldn't
> >>be implemented in such a way to cause a break in your rendered output.
> >
> >Mmm. That's how I wanted it to be used.
> >
> >Rationale please Michael?
> 
> The "Duck book" describes beginpage like so:
> 
> ] Description
> ] 
> ] The BeginPage element marks the location of an actual page break in a
> ] print version of the document, as opposed to where a page break might
> ] appear in a further rendition of the document. This information may be
> ] used, for example, to allow support staff using an online system to
> ] coordinate with a user referring to a page number in a printed manual.
> ] 
> ] Processing expectations
> ] 
> ] The break identified by BeginPage may be displayed in an online
> ] version of the document or used for legacy purposes, but it is not
> ] expected to cause a page break when the document is processed by an
> ] SGML system.
> 
> This sounds to me like <beginpage> is metadata describing the location of a
> page break in a print version of a document, instead of an instruction, to
> the formatter.
> 
> 					m@
> 
> +-mbraun@urbana.css.mot.com-+- I was chasin' a ghost pale and white-----------+
> |   Matt Braun -- Motorola, |    and hard to see;  The boys in blue from      |
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