Re: [docbook-apps] Full text justification control with long URLs

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

Shawn Giese <shawngiese@bluewin.ch> writes:

> I was wondering if there was any XSL control to limit full
> justification when the % of white space is big.

I think it's not something the can be controlled well through XSL.
It's something that's handled by whatever tool you use to produce
your PDF output.

Anyway, it seems that one of the limitations of using
justification is that you sometimes end up with certain lines that
have too much whitespace. One way to completely eliminate the
problem is too turn off both right-justification and hyphenation.

You can do that but setting the "hyphenate" XSL param to "0" and
the value of the "alignment" to "left".

  http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/xsl/doc/fo/hyphenate.html
  http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/xsl/doc/fo/alignment.html

> What I get is that some lines in my FO/PDF have a URL after some
> text and the words before the URL gets way to many white spaces
> to make the text full fustified across the screen, otherwise a
> word can be nicely hyphenated.  I saw this but I don't know if
> it is what is needed since it just adds a space between each
> letter.
> http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/styling/fo.html#d2635e175 

The info there is a bit out of date now, I think. There's now an
XSL param for controlling hyphenation of URLs (well, URLs that are
output from Ulink, at least) -

  http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/xsl/doc/fo/ulink.hyphenate.html

But you may be better off altogether by not having the URLs for
Ulinks rendered inline. There is an option for suppressing inline
rendering of them, and option for having them rendered as
footnotes instead.

  http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/xsl/doc/fo/ulink.show.html
  http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/xsl/doc/fo/ulink.footnotes.html

Set "ulink.show" to 0 and "ulink.footnotes" to 1 to try it.

> And, in a comment probably showing my ignorance of XML, is there
> any XSL conversion from docbook to SVG?  

You mean you want to convert your entire DocBook document to SVG?
Or just some part of it?

I think FOP can output SVG. So you could convert to XSL-FO output
using the DocBook stylesheets, and then convert that to SVG using
FOP. Or you could convert from XSL-FO to PDF, then convert the PDF
to SVG.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael Smith
http://sideshowbarker.net/

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