Vincent Hennebert said:
> Dear Fop users,
>
> I'm currently thinking about the implementation of side-floats
> (<fo:float float="start/end">) into Fop.
This is great news! Lack of side float support have actually prevented us
from using FOP in our main XSL-FO application, for the last 4 years or so.
> It turns out that there is a
> choice to make between several design decisions which imply different
> behaviors regarding the placement of floats on the page.
>
> To help me make a decision, I'd like to know which usage you would make
> of side-floats: on a general manner, what sort of typographic material
> would you typeset using side-floats? Particular things of which we don't
> think in the first place?
We're using side floats to implement a kind of marginalia. When some
content was deleted from the previous version of a document, our clients
want to see a change bar and a left-pointing arrow in the left margin.
Example:
<fo:float font-family="Symbol" width="4.5mm" float="left"
start-indent="-6mm+1.5mm">
<fo:block font-family="Symbol" width="4.5mm"
>←</fo:block>
</fo:float>
The negative start-indent puts the float in the left margin, out of the
content flow. The objective is to not affect the content layout.
We expect this start-float to appear roughly at the same height as its
anchor, and certainly on the same page.
>
> More specifically, as the XSL-FO recommendation allows some freedom in
> these areas:
> - would you expect a side-float being placed on another page than its
> anchor? Would you prefer the whole chunk of text to be deferred on the
> following page?
We expect them on the same page, whatever happens. However, we put those
floats in the margin, so that they don't alter the region-body layout at
all.
> - would you expect a side-float being split on several pages?
There's nothing to split in our case: we only have a single character in
the float.
> - would you expect different layouts, depending on whether a set of
> side-floats would be placed on the middle of a page or at the bottom
> (thus, with some of them on the current page and the others on the
> following page)?
>
It would be problematic for us if a document had so many deletions that
the side-floats would stack horizontally and begin to alter the text
layout, or to stack vertically (with fo:float clear attribute) and be
pushed to the next page.
The ideal for us would be to stack them on the z-axis.
>
>
> Any comments, remarks, hints of all sort would be welcome.
I wish we could position the float in the margin using absolute x
coordinates. So, we could position the float at say -6mm from the left
border of region-body and at the same height (y axis) as the anchor. If
I'm not mistaken, this is not possible in XSL-FO, because we're mixing
absolute and relative positioning.
I haven't looked in details into XSL-FO 1.1 change bars, so I don't know
if that new feature would cover our use case (i.e. if we can somehow make
the change bar look like an arrow).
Thanks for the poll,
Benoit
>
> Thanks,
> Vincent
>
..................................................
Benoit Maisonny [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Director & Consultant http://synclude.com
Synclude
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