Re: Fill line ends with dots

On 8/15/08 5:23 AM, "Linda van den Brink" <brinkwoman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I'm looking for a way to fill the end of all lines in a (left-aligned)
> block not with spaces, but with a character like a dot or a dash. I
> don't think a leader is the answer here, because not only the end of
> each block must be filled, but the end of each line within a block
> given a certain area width, something like this (I hope the email
> program doesn't mangle this):

The only thing I can think of is to do a trick with overlayed blocks where
you have an underlying block that fills with lines of dots and an overlayed
block with the text with an opaque white background color on the text. Not
sure that would work.

I can't think of any other way you could do this in a one-pass process with
XSL-FO as it would require an FO feature to request it.

With both XEP and XSL Formatter you could post-process their (proprietary)
area tree intermediate files to replace trailing whitespace with dots.

Or you could request a proprietary extension.

XSL Formatter now has an FO-to-InDesign path that is intended to allow you
to use InDesign as a post-composition cleanup environment. You could do it
there as well, using an InDesign script to post-process those paragraphs
(not sure how complicated that would be without trying it).

In a more procedural system like 3B2 you have the notion of being able to
bind processing to line-wrap "events". You would need something like that in
FO to implement this type of feature but that's definitely not in 1.1. There
may be something like that envisioned for FO 2.0.

Cheers,

E.

----
Eliot Kimber | Senior Solutions Architect | Really Strategies, Inc.
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