Thanks Ken,
I understand now that I have to do some trial and error calculation
on the character count.
I was hoping to avoid that, but I think I can get that close enough.
I don't think I can change the extent on the static-content, can I?
Out of curiosity... did you use a different simple-page-master per
potential number of lines?
I did think about abusing the header of a table, but I ran into some
issues with that,
so I think I go for the estimated guessing approach
Cheers
Geert
At 18:26 29/01/2013, you wrote:
At 2013-01-29 12:12 +0100, Geert Bormans wrote:
On my pages I have a region-before with some header information
(to be precise, there are 4 fields in a small table that servers as
the page header)
One of the fields in this header can range from some 10 characters up to 128
At some point this field breaks onto the next line. When that
happens, part of the second line becomes invisible
(outside the region-before extent)
My customer likes the layout (so the region-before extent should
not be bigger on most pages by default)
but when the header overflows to the next line, then the extent
should be made bigger
Is there a simple way to do that?
You have to make some estimates on your part, and your customer
needs to accept that there will be edge cases when the height of the
page content is not as big as it could be.
I was presented with your very situation when printing US
Intelligence documents where the header is between 1 and 10 lines
long: having 9 blank lines most of the time is totally
unacceptable. Yet the security classification can vary and be very
detailed, but often is very short. The project is described here:
http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/links/ipepaper.htm
I ended up calculating the region-before height by first determining
the content belonging in the header and then doing a character
count. I simply divided the count by a "generous" interpretation of
the number of characters in a line, and set the region height
accordingly. Granted, there were some times that the actual
rendered length turned out to be, say, 5 lines and I had reserved 6,
but because of how I calculated the line lengths, that rarely
happened. I erred on the side of leaving a one-line gap, rather
than losing content (especially a security constraint!) on the page.
And it is only an estimate, as there is no access through the
specification to the font metrics. If you happen to have outside
access to the font metrics of the font you are using, then you can
perhaps have a very accurate calculation of how much room you'll need.
If you don't have a page number in the variable sized bit, you could
try putting your entire content into a one-column table with a table
header that repeats on every page. That header can have any number
of lines. And in subsequent page sequences (or table groups you
decide on) you can have a different number of lines in your table
header as a pseudo-page-header. And if you are using XSL-FO 1.1
(which I couldn't in 2005), you can use retrieve-table-marker in
order to mimic retrieving page markers.
I hope this helps.
. . . . . . . . . Ken
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