Re: [docbook-apps] generating an index with 2 columns

[diane larin <diane@inro.ca>]

After an exchange off-line, Bob found why I was not able to generate an index with 2 columns.
For the archive, here is what Bob sent me:

This is an index inside an article, rather than in a book.  An article in DocBook is processed in a single fo:page-sequence, and there is no option in XSL-FO to switch to two-column layout in the middle of a page-sequence.

 

However, you could define the article's page-sequence as two columns, and then put everything else before the index inside an fo:block with span="all".    Then it will revert to two columns for the index.

 

You would need to set the column.count.body stylesheet parameter to 2, and customize the match="article" template from fo/component.xsl to add the block wrapper, starting before the titlepage.  Where it currently says:

 

<xsl:apply-templates/>

 

instead it should be:

 

<xsl:apply-templates select="*[not(self::index)]"/>

</fo:block> <!-- close the span block -->

<xsl:apply-templates select="index"/>

I did the changes as suggested and it worked!

Many thanks to Bob for all his help.


Diane Larin
INRO

----- Original Message ----- From: "Diane Larin" <diane@inro.ca>
To: <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 3:13 PM
Subject: [docbook-apps] generating an index with 2 columns


Hello,

I am generating a pdf version of my docbook document using docbook-xsl-1.71.1 and XEP-4.7. In the resulting output, the Index page has one column only. I am using the default titlepage.templates.xsl. Although the default value for column.count.index is 2, I tried setting this parameter explicitly to 2 and then 3 with no changes. There is always one column only. What am I doing wrong?

Diane Larin
INRO