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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Ending a book with "Notes"


On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 02:41:57PM +0100, Camille Bignis wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> For printing reasons, printed books usually ends with a few to many 
> blank pages.
> 
> Has someone come up with a solution with DocBook to fill those blank 
> pages with a "Notes" header?

This issue illustrates one of the problems with the
FO architecture: the stylesheet cannot do much about
page counts.

The "Notes" pages are usually the leftover pages of a
print signature.  A book is typically printed in 
16- or 32-page signatures (large sheets of paper
printed 16- or 32-up).  If your typesetting does not
end evenly on a signature boundary, you get blank
pages for the rest.  Some publishers print "Notes"
on those pages so they don't seem totally useless.

But pagination of a DocBook book takes place after
the DocBook stylesheet has completed its work and
passed the result to an FO processor.  Only the FO
processor knows how many pages are in the book, and
whether they end on a signature boundary.  

So the question is, can an FO processor be instructed to
keep issuing pages (of a certain "blank" page-master)
modulo the signature size?  The "force-page-count" property
does not take an integer or expression, just variations on
even or odd.  The "initial-page-number" property takes an
integer, but that would have to be on a page sequence that
follows the last one, which then would not be last.  So I
don't see how to do it with the current FO properties.

-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
The SCO Group                               fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@sco.com


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