At 2003-12-16 13:39 -0500, Kyle Partridge wrote:
ASCII art sometimes doesn't reflect a lot of nuance ... are you just
showing that item5 begins to the right of item2?
Yes, exactly.
Fine ... that can be fixed by an inline container.
Where do you want item3 if item2 is longer than the tab location?
Hmmm... That's a good question.
What I want is for these "tabs" to behave like "tabs" behave in
a word-processing program...so, if item4 runs over it's allotted space,
then, "pressing" tab should just bring you to the next "tab stop".
That I cannot do for you in XSL-FO ... this is because at transformation
time one has no idea of formatted lengths.
If <p tabs="0.2 1.2 2.2">
Are those inches? You still haven't described what this is for a
specification.
then that should indicate "tab stops" within
the paragraph block? Sort of like (* indicating a "tab stop"):
-*-------*-------*------------------------
item item2 item3
item4 item5 blah blah and if i say <tab> now, nothing happens, there
are no more tabs
If item2 is longer than the tab location:
-*-------*-------*------------------------
item item2 goes on too long...item3 (because the tab before 3 is now
meaningless)
Being the last tab stop, my ideas would work, but if item1 went past the
desired stop of item2 I could not provide for you item2 starting at where
item3 would have started. Given that item1 overflows its tab, I could
start item3 as far away from the start of item2, with item2 starting
shortly after (or immediately after) item1 ... would that be acceptable? I
acknowledge that on a long list of lines on a page this would stick out
like a sore thumb.
If not, then we know right away (I think) that XSL-FO cannot give you what
you are looking for ... yet another reason to do this.
Truncating the data would guarantee that all of the columns would line up,
but then you'd be missing data.
Wrapping the data in a tap stop would guarantee that all of the columns
would line up and you wouldn't be missing any data, but you would get some
doubled-up lines. You could distinguish the starts of lines by having the
wrapped tab stops be indented.
Would either of the above be acceptable?
BTW, for those on the list who attended my presentation last week at
XML'2003 on formatting specifications, doing this is what I called creating
the prototype in XSL-FO, which is done after someone might produce a mockup
in some other technology for visualization.
........................ Ken
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