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Subject: thinking about sections, sub-sections and pagebreaks
(this has *some* connection to just plain docbook semantics, but i thought it was more appropriate here. i've posted on this before but i've had more time to think about it.) i'm curious about how one should view the connection between sections, subsections and page breaks. consider the fairly straightforward docbook markup which represents a section and a number of subsections (where i'll use abbreviations for section and title for brevity): <s><t>Major section</t> <s><t>Subsection 1</t> </s> <s><t>Subsection 2</t> </s> ... and so on ... </s> obviously, the semantics are that we're defining a section that itself consists of a number of subsections, which is perfectly reasonable. the problem comes with wanting to render this so that each subsection starts on a new page, something that is fairly common with printed output. if you use a stylesheet addition that defines a "break-before" for those sections, the problem is that your printed output will have page breaks in the following places: <s><t>Major section</t> ----- break ----- <s><t>Subsection 1</t> ... ----- break ----- <s><t>Subsectino 2</t> ... ----- break ----- and so on. in other words, the Major section starts on a new page (good), but the immediately following subsection *also* jumps to a new page, which leaves pertty much a blank page after the Major section title (not so good). now, semantically, it is sometimes reasonable to have the text immediately following a Major section represent some kind of lead-up or intro to the upcoming subsections, and that's what would appear on that first page: <s><t>Major section</t> <p> ... some intro here to lay the groundwork for the subsections to follow ... </p> ----- page break here, which would be acceptable ----- <s><t>Subsection 1</t> ... </s> but it's not always appropriate to do this -- there may not be anything you want to say before the first subsection -- you just want to get right down to business and you're back where you started. OTOH, you can look at the markup just above, where the text underneath the "Major section" *is* what you want as the first subsection. this is one way to fake the final effect, but it breaks the obvious semantics. what seems to be required is some kind of stylesheet transform that says "break-before page", *unless* you're just immediately starting a new subsection with no intervening text. does this make sense? is this what others would try to do? or am i not looking at this the right way? (and if it's the correct solution, anyone care to provide the stylesheet fragment for it? i mean, i'm getting better at this, but it's still early and i'm open to suggestions.) rday p.s. and i'm still struggling with how to best render a set of "exercises". argh.
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