RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: how to insert page breaks after sections in PDF ?

[Jeff Beal <jeff.beal@ansys.com>]

If you really want to get into customizations, may I also recommend Michael
Kay's book on XSLT ("XSLT Programmer's Reference: 2nd Edition" from Wrox
Press).  Norm, Bob, Jirka, et al. have done a great job making their XSL
stylesheets easily customizable with a huge number of parameters and the
gentext and titlepage template mechanisms.  However, it would be impossible
for them to anticipate and/or accomodate all of the requirements and wishes
of all DocBook users.  I've found a good knowledge of the XSLT language
itself indispensable (sp?) at really understanding what's going on in the
bowels of DocBook and how I can make some pretty sophisticated changes.

XSL customization can be quite complicated in many ways.  Basically, you
need to be the master of the source language (DocBook), the target language
(XSL-FO or HTML+CSS), the transformation language (XSLT), and the stylesheet
base (The XSLT stylesheets from the DocBook distribution).  The Definitive
Guide covers the source language.  Dave Pawson's book covers XSL-FO.
Between Bob Stayton's tutorial and the FO/HTML parameter references, the
"easy" customization methods for DocBook are pretty well covered.  Again,
for sophisticated customization, you really need to have a good
understanding of XSLT itself, and Michael Kay's book is the best I've run
across.

Jeff Beal

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert P. J. Day [mailto:rpjday@mindspring.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 3:22 PM
To: Jeff Beal
Cc: docbook apps list
Subject: RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: how to insert page breaks after sections in
PDF ?


On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Jeff Beal wrote:

> I have the following template in my customization layer that forces a page
> break and places the section on an odd-numbered page, based on the
existence
> of a role attribute:
> 
> <xsl:template match="sect1[@role='rightpagestart']">
>   <fo:block break-before="odd-page"/>
>   <xsl:apply-imports/>
> </xsl:template>

clearly, i have more reading to do.  i was working my way
thru bob stayton's web site and followed the links to the
sourceforge pages for the "HTML Parameter Reference" and 
"FO Parameter Reference", which said nothing about any of
this stuff.  

obviously, there's a lot more to the customization than i
found at those pages.  so, dumb question: how should i have
known that?

like i said, i clearly have more reading to do.  i just picked
up a copy of dave p's "XSL-FO".  might as well get comfortable.

rday