Re: [office-comment] Requirement: page and line break indicators

[Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>]

Sean,

In what way does the use of <text:soft-page-break> not meet your 
requirement?

Granted that different applications will have varying support for that 
element, resulting is as you note below, different presentations, but 
what more can a format do other than allow the specification of the page 
breaks?

That some application chooses to ignore them or doesn't support 
<text:soft-page-break>, I am not real sure what the format can do to assist.

Am I missing the problem?

Granted I would really like to see a robust solution, given my interest 
in ancient texts where line breaks, etc. are essential to understanding 
dittography and other features of ancient texts. But, other than 
recording the presence of such breaks, what do you see a format as being 
able to offer?

Thanks for writing!

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

Sean McGrath wrote:
> +NAME
> Sean McGrath
>
> +CONTACT
> seanmcgrath@propylon.com
>
> +CATEGORY (select one or more from below)
> import-export
>
> +SCOPE (select one or more from below)
> text
>
> +USE CASE
> I have a set of ODT documents to batch process into a report. The 
> report needs to cite locations in the ODT documents
> using page and line number.
>
> +DESCRIPTION
> Unlike some "high end" wordprocessor/DTP packages such as FrameMaker, ODT
> provides no way to access hard/soft page breaks or hard/soft line breaks.
>
> Obviously, the soft line/page break information is volatile - opening 
> up the same
> ODT in another ODT processor will most likely result in new soft 
> line/page breaks.
>
> However, there are many high-volume usage scenarios where having 
> access to line/page
> number information of the last rendering is very useful. Examples 
> include citation of line/page info
> in reports, back-linking from HTML to PDF on a page-by-page basis, 
> pre-flight checks etc.
>
> This problem of page/line view on one side and content-oriented object 
> flow view is as old as the hills.
> I'm a big fan of designing around the latter but facilitating the 
> former. I.e. allowing
> ODT implementations to optionally record soft page/line break 
> information in point elements
> or perhaps processing instructions.
>
> Sean
>
>
>

-- 
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)