Re: I'm obviously doing something wrong

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 JBryant@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> First, you have a data issue: Regardless of indentation, the Topic and
> Panel elements are siblings.

Good point, this was something I did change at some point because of
trying to solve other issues. I was trying to prototype the output of
something and ran into a rather frustrating series of problems, mostly
because I really don't understand the whole system terribly well.

> You also have an FO problem: In your simple-page-master, you specify
> regions but don't provide names.

Good catch, thanks.

> Consequently, the regions will never be inserted into the document,
> resulting in an empty document.

Which was the problem I was trying to solve much earlier, when I got into
a corner I couldn't get back out of. Thank you for the insight.

> I'd also be surprised if you didn't get multiple error messages from
> your processor. I suppose you're not getting to these errors because
> the FO processor doesn't recognize the Topics node. As David Carlisle
> pointed out, you need to transform with XSLT to get an FO document and
> then use an FO processor construct your result document (PDF, I
> suppose) from the FO document.

Weirdly (to me) when I actually uploaded it to a Unix host and tried it
from the command line, I got a workable document:

$ fop -xml Topics.xml -xsl mTopicsPanels.xsl Topics-2.pdf
[INFO] Using org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser as SAX2 Parser
[INFO] FOP 0.20.5
[INFO] Using org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser as SAX2 Parser
[INFO] building formatting object tree
[INFO] setting up fonts
[INFO] [1]
[WARNING] Some static content could not fit in the area.
[INFO] Parsing of document complete, stopping renderer

...which can be seen as http://deirdre.org/~deirdre/fop/Topics-2.pdf

I wasn't taking care to prevent the lopping off of the date, which is
what didn't fit.

Same toolchain as in oXygen, so I'm not sure why there's such radically
different results.

> I have no idea what tools are in the Oxygen system, so I can't give more
> specific advice. However, the general process should be the same
> regardless of tools:
> XML source + XSLT stylesheet + XSLT processor => XSL-FO document
> XSL-FO document + XSL-FO processor => result document

All of that's in oXygen (Xerces-J, Xalan, Saxon (2 versions) FOP, etc.).

However, that said, apparently there are more issues with the environment
than I thought. Sigh. At least I can get a workable .fo to inspect, maybe
I'll just rely on it that far.

-- 
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