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Ian Tindale wrote:
> Basically, I think I'm saying that the flow notion can be harmful unless
> you're a] working on a 'free' media, (such as screen, and scroll down and
> there's more 'screen' - ie, not paper, which costs money per more pages) and
> b] there's in implicit understanding that the flow feature isn't a saviour
...
> Don't get me wrong - flow is good - but when it meets paper, and things go
> wrong, it can cost.
I'm not sure I understand what you want to say.
1. You can use XSLFO to place boxes: there are absolutely positioned
block containers. There are some demos for nice paper forms using
this technique. You've still the fo:flow element though, because
said block-containers have to be placed in it.
2. TeX is based on a concept which is basically the same as XSLFO
flows. A great many paper books have been produced with TeX, I
personally was involved for one or two. If things went wrong,
this was quickly noticed using an onscreen preview. I never
noticed anyone having a major problem with flowing text when it
came to produce books or journal articles.
3. I have produced quite a few paper booklets using
XML -> (XSLT) -> XSLFO -> (FO formatter) -> PDF -> Printer
Quite a few people have been made happy by providing them
with a nicely paginated PDF having the same content as the
HTML page they look at, so that they can print it for making
notices or taking it to read it in the train.
Well, perhaps:
> If you've got a
> certain allocation of space, that's it - that's your territory, and it isn't
> / shouldn't change.
Sounds like newspaper layout, or marketing brochures. Cool, but hardly
the only area in publishing.
> Ask any beginner designer who doesn't know how to set
> section-starts in Xpress and keeps having to hide those 10 or 20 intermediate
> blank pages they keep printing out each time.
The FO formatter I use does not produce blank pages until the FO
source specifically requires it. Oh well, it happens that unwanted
blank pages are produced. This is considered a bug, and usually the
style sheet which generates the FO has to be fixed.
J.Pietschmann
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