RE: [dita] Recommendations for "page break" requests?

["Paul Grosso" <pgrosso@arbortext.com>]

 

Don says, on the one hand, this can't easily be put into

a stylesheet, but on the other hand that direct mods in

the source are harmful.

 

Either PIs (with which I have no problem--we're talking

about processing, after all) or source elements are direct

mods in the source.  No use arguing between those choices

if we don't want direct mods in the source.

 

If you don't want direct mods in the source, then you're

talking about a stylesheet in one way or the other.  Maybe

it's a special "linebreak/pagebreak exception file" rather

than an official XSL-FO stylesheet, but it's still a stylesheet

in the general sense.  I could theoretically imagine making

something like this work via an XPath that points to where

the break should be, but I suspect this would get too

complicated in practice.

 

So if we don't want direct mods in the source and we don't

want a stylesheet, what's the alternative that I'm missing?

 

My preference right now is to use PIs because I think

something in the source is the only practical way to go, we

are taking about instructing the processing of the document, 

and because making them a PI instead of an element makes it

easier to toss them from any "database" since you probably

don't want to store such info in a topic permanently.

 

paul

---

From: Don Day [mailto:dond@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, 2004 September 16 17:17
To: DITA TC list
Subject: [dita] Recommendations for "page break" requests?

Yes, I know the mantra, "XML promises separation of presentation from content." Yet our users still ask for page breaks, line breaks, and other presentational nudges that just can't be separated easily into a stylesheet.

Processing Instructions and other direct mods in a source topic are considered harmful; if the topic is reused elsewhere, the instruction could cause mischief.

So while this is a general question, it still has bearing on work we might do down the road on a recommended style mechanism for DITA:

>>>> For page and line breaks in particular, what do you do, and what do you recommend?