RE: [docbook-apps] Table column sizes with xmlto/PassiveTex

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

Do you have anything in the width attribute of your DocBook table columns or
are you expecting the processing system to automatically re-size the table
columns based on the content (as HTML browsers will do)?  If you are looking
for the latter, you'll need to find an FO formatter that supports the
table-layout="auto" formatting property.  The only formatter I know of that
supports this is the XMLMind FO Converter (xmlmind.com), which converts FO
to RTF and has several (IMHO) more critical limitations.

If you do have something like width="3*" in your DocBook source, I don't
believe PassiveTex supports these values.  However, you can use the DocBook
tablecolumns.extension (using Saxon or Xerces as your XSLT processor) to
convert those to fixed widths in the output FO.

Jeff Beal

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin S. Van Horn [mailto:kvanhorn@ksvanhorn.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 1:29 PM
> To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org; kvanhorn@ksvanhorn.com
> Subject: [docbook-apps] Table column sizes with xmlto/PassiveTex
> 
> 
> I've run into what strikes me as a rather bizarre behavior when using 
> "xmlto ps <file>.xml" to produce Postscript output from a 
> DocBook file 
> -- all table columns are the same width (about one inch).  
> This causes 
> really awful-looking output, as some columns are much too 
> wide for the 
> content they contain, and others are much too short.  HTML 
> renderers fit 
> table column widths to the content, unless otherwise 
> specified, and so 
> does LaTeX, so I don't understand why PassiveTeX doesn't do this 
> (assuming that it is to blame, and not some earlier stage of 
> processing).
> 
> Is there any reasonably straightforward way to get table 
> column widths 
> to fit their content?
> 
> 
> 
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