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Re: xsl-fo: mixed page layout & column orphans/widows & vertical column balancing/distribution

2003-03-28 06:55:11
At 2003-03-28 10:36 +0000, Philip Fitzsimons wrote:
mixed page layout:
1) if I set up a page with three columns and put a number of blocks in it -
a mixture of text and tables, how do specify that I want a table to span
multiple columns? note I am not talking about spanning cells here - I have a
table that is bigger than the width of the page columns so I want to flow
into across two page columns.

In XSL-FO 1.0 you can only span one column or all columns, not only some of the columns. And the act of spanning all columns reflows and rebalances previous page content across all the columns in the area before the span.

column orphans/widows:
2) if I have a block which contains one line of text on its own how do I
stop this - I can see how to do it for a page but how for a column? i.e. the
line is on the 2nd column at the bottom and I would have preferred it to be
on the 3rd column at the top.

Orphans and widows are only triggered when you have more than one line in a block. If you know at XSLT time the line is too short (which you probably don't if it is typical prose text, but you probably do if it is just a heading line), you could play with the keep-with-next.within-column= property.

vertical column balancing/distribution:
3) if I have three columns and fill it with text (say about 90% full) then
the last column will only be abut 70% full - is there anyway to increase
the distrubution of blocks of line spacing to get it to fill the whole
column

Not with XSL-FO ... you can't fill the last column to the length of the page. However, you *can* balance all the columns on the last page to be close to the same length (just not the full length of the page) by flowing an empty block at the end of your content with span="all". This will trigger the reflowing and rebalancing I describe above. Your columns might end up being 80%, 80%, 79%, instead of 90%, 90%, 70% ... but I can't help you get 90%, 90%, 90%.

I hope this helps.

............ Ken

--
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G. Ken Holman                mailto:gkholman(_at_)CraneSoftwrights(_dot_)com
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