It's an interesting idea. However, I suspect this will probably not be necessary. We should be able to make the breaker clever enough to handle this particular case. ATM, I don't have free brain capacity to dive into this (even though this is an important and long-awaited feature) but it may make sense to gather ideas and notes from the mailing list archives and put these on a Wiki page. I remember that several approaches have been discussed in the past even though they haven't had anything to do with our current breaking approach.
On 23.09.2005 20:28:14 Andreas L Delmelle wrote: > Hi, > > (Apologies for the many posts... I'm definitely on a roll :-)) > > Now that it has been made clear to me that the layout-engine first > calculates *all* break-possibilities, IMO this also seems to make > implementing page-position="last" much, much easier. > > Assuming that no areas are generated until the full element list is > known, I'm thinking once you have created the Knuth-element list, > instead of starting at element index zero to generate the areas, it > would also be possible to have the algorithm start at the last element > in the list until we reach the first break-possibility that would make > the content exceed the height page-master whose page-position is > "last", no? > At the very least, it would enable us to mark the break-possibility at > which the algorithm should consider the last page-master... Obviously, > we can't complete the full iteration in that direction, or we would run > into problems determining the difference between odd and even, but it > seems possible to iterate backwards once and assign a sort of > 'favorability degree' to each of break-possibilities --increase or > decrease penalty values?--, taking into account that the last page > *has* to start somewhere after the marked one --before is impossible, > since it won't fit. The generated last page can be thrown away (or > serialized to be re-used if the marked possibility just happens to > coincide with the actual last page-break). > > Am I getting this correctly? Jeremias Maerki
