Re: Printing XML + XSLT (2nd try)

Omar Lopez Ruis writes:
>>     Imagine a bill, or an order form, with many columns and
>> more than a page. If I transform that into HTML, when the user prints
>> maybe the result don't fit the paper, and what about with many pages
>> and I want to put parcial totals at the bottom of every page. Can you
>> see the problem?

Michael Kay replies:
> ... I don't see any evidence that that spec is tackling the problem
> either. XSL comes from the document handling tradition and not
> the data processing tradition.

This is one of most salient deficiencies in the current version of
the XSL Formatting Objects - absolutely no support for rendering-time
scripting. If you know exactly how many bill items fit on one page,
you can insert a subtotal every N items and a page break immediately
following the subtotal, simulating more or less the same functionality.
I agree this is not an elegant way of doing it.

This functionality is very close to running headers/footers: even
the simplest running footer like one proposed by James Tauber
few months ago would solve the problem. This has always been
a source of irritation for XSL FO implementors; however, little
progress is apparently being done in this direction.

As an aside: We now plan to implement several extensions
to XSL FO that will enable us to perform tasks like the one
mentioned above; the risk is, however, that this homegrown
solution will have nothing in common with the standard. But,
given the XSL FO progress speed, we hope to have at least
a year before our solution will be overridden ;-).

Regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev

RenderX



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