two-column spans for figure and table

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

If you need to produce articles or chapters in a two-column format, you
might be interested in this.

I needed to be able to produce an article in a two-column format, but I also
needed to support wide figures and tables that spanned across both columns.
The DocBook DTD provides the pgwide="1" attribute to turn this on, but the
DocBook XSL stylesheets have not supported it.  That's because in the
current XSL-FO 1.0 standard, a fo:block with a span="all" property must be a
direct child of the fo:flow in the page sequence. Since the DocBook XSL
stylesheets do a lot of block nesting, this seemed to be impossible.

But I went through the block nesting in detail, and found that it is not as
bad as I thought.  I managed to create a customization file that supports
column spans for tables and figures.  It currently only works when you use
'section', not 'sect1' et al, in your article.  Unfortunately, span="all"
does not seem to work in FOP, despite that property being listed as
supported.  8^(

If you want to read more about this and download the customization, see the
description of the feature request (#1036307) that I filed on SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1036307&group_id=21935&atid=373750

I would be interested in feedback, particularly of any problems that you run
into when using it.  Perhaps this could be folded back into the stock
stylesheet at some point.



Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
DocBook Consulting
bobs@sagehill.net