DOCBOOK-APPS: Table problems in FO

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

Title: Personal Stationery

I'm starting to work with throwing our documentation through XEP for PDF output, and I'm running into a few problems with tables. 

 

First, if I don't specifically specify a rowsep or colsep on the tgroup, the FO stylesheets are not drawing cell borders.  I've been poking around for a bit, and this line from the CALS specification seems to indicate that the default value for these should be 1: "Default = IMPLIED, (means use value from tgroupstyle if any, else from <table> if any, else '1')." ). "  (http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/a502.htm).  When I do specify a rowsep or colsep as 1, the cell borders appear correctly, so I'm assuming this is a stylesheet bug and not a XEP bug.

 

My other problem is a little stickier.  It involves table widths.  We have been using absolute column widths on all of our tables (2,392 of them, to be exact.) and our current print engine (Epic 3.0.1) determines the table width based on the sum of the column widths.  The XSL stylesheets don't do that.  Without turning on the tablecolumn.extensions, we get columns that extend past the edge of the table, or gaps between the edge of the rightmost column and the leftmost column.  With the tablecolumn.extensions, we get a lot of tables that look either compressed or stretched.

 

I think I can fix the first problem by overriding the inherit.table.attribute template, I'm just wondering if I should file a bug.  I'm a little bit more lost on the second problem.  I'm pretty sure that all of our column widths are expressed in inches, so I can just add them up.  I'm wondering, though, if anybody has any better suggestions for this problem.

 

Thanks,

 

Jeff Beal

Tools Specialist

ANSYS, Inc.

(724) 514-3150