RE: [docbook-apps] initial pdf view with index side pane

["Mauritz Jeanson" <mj@johanneberg.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Henwood [mailto:rjhenwood@yahoo.co.uk]
> 
> Is there a switch I can throw to force the PDF that is generated to default
> to displaying the index as a (left-hand) side bar?
>
> The best I could find from my searching was:
> http://wiki.apache.org/xmlgraphics-fop/ExtensionsForPdf but I am unsure how
> to interpret this page. Any help would be gratefully appreciated!


That FOP wiki page contains ideas for future extension development. If you use FOP, then I don't think there is a solution today. Some prototype work was done a long time ago: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FOP-1556.

Another FO processor, XEP, has a special processing instruction for specifying the initial PDF view. The following is understood by XEP and makes the bookmarks panel visible when opening the resulting PDF (it works in Adobe Reader; there may be PDF readers that don't recognize this):

 <?xep-pdf-view-mode show-bookmarks?>

See http://www.renderx.com/reference.html#View_Mode.

The DocBook-XSL stylesheets can insert this and other processing instructions in the FO output via customization of the "user-xep-pis" template in xep.xsl.

Mauritz