RE: a custom header according to page number

[Cyril Rognon]

If you only need to ditinguish the first page from the other ones, simply use a different page-master (reference or name ;-) according to the spec conformance) and use this page master for your cover page only. This will do the trick easily.

one page-master for the cover (one page-sequence using this page-master-reference) , and different page-master for the rest of the page sequences.

I strongly recomend you to read some FO tutorial, this will spare you a lot of research work (you'll find some ref on http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/)
At 14:18 03/12/2001 +0000, you wrote:

Thanks Cyril,
please see answers below

Your question is a little underspecified ...

...

[Ismaeil, Sameh] no, I don't want to distinguish odd and even pages, specifically, I need to distinguish the frist page from the rest of the pages, any clue?

Don't think about using some predicate considering the page number, xsl fo and fop are loosely coupled, it is meant to be that way. So it forbids the user to use the internal page number programaticaly (some FO processor provide extension to do this, fop does not).

[Ismaeil, Sameh] yes, I kind of noticed that , it is usually one way: FOP code -> fo XSL ->pdf document

if your need is more complex and you have some magic formula to guess wich page is affected, conditionnal master-page may be to low level ...

[Ismaeil, Sameh] I'll give conditional-master-page some insight and hope it will work, thanks a lot

Good luck.

...

Cyril Rognon
http://www.objectiva.fr