Peter,
thanks for the answer.
I have always *assumed* that column balancing is implied whenever top-level block children of a flow have different "span" attributes, because it's the only approach that makes sense. If your second scenario were intended, then the 'span="all"' block could not share the page with the previous 'span="none"' blocks unless there were less than one column's worth of text. I.e.
Yes, that sure makes sense, but it's not really anywhere in the spec, is it?
You can still argue the spec makes sense without column balancing - at least you can use span=all blocks before span=none blocks.
No, it's not specified that I can see. However, the restriction above would be highly artificial.
That leaves open the question of whether, on the last page of a page-sequence, the columns should be balanced. My intuitive approach would be to balance always. However, there seems to be another attribute required for column spill behaviour, especially for the last page of a page-sequence.
I assume you really mean the end of the flow (or page-sequence) here, right?
Yes. There's only one flow per page-sequence.
"last page" could also be something like:
ABC DDD DDD
or even
ABC DDD EFG
Personally, I'd prefer no balancing for the end of the flow. Reason: For columns that contain
mostly text, that looks awfully strange if you can't have at least 2 paragraphs in each column.
Since the default behaviour really seems to be unspecified, and since there's no property to specify it,
I believe overall less harm is done if you don't balance at the end of the flow. This is because then you
can always trick the renderer into balancing by making the end "not the end". Just put an fo:block
with invisible content and span="all" at the end. Of course, a property for that would be nice, but at
least then you can have both.
How about that?
Very sensible. I had in mind my preferred method of dynamic balancing, but even with that model, it is simple enough to undo the balancing on the last page of a sequence.
Peter -- Peter B. West http://www.powerup.com.au/~pbwest/resume.html
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