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a novice's question

Subject: a novice's question
From: "anilia bruho" <musoryanin@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 02:04:17 GMT
a novice's question
Here's a novice's question:

From reading the XSL spec I got the idea that XSLT has a fairly complete set
of programming features (conditions, loops, etc.) but is not concerned with any visual formatting issues. Now, that's logical. But on the other end of the rope there's XSL FO which offers a good inventory of formatting parameters, but has no programming abilities at all. This seems much less logical to me.

I'm a designer and I must say that visual formatting involves a lot of algorithmic elements - comparisons, calsulations, selections among alternatives, etc. Just one example: in a recent project I needed to format all the headings (in a huge document) in such a way that, first, a width measurement of the heading's text set in a certain font is taken, and second, depending on whether this width exceeds some specified constant, one of two formatting models for this heading is selected, with different indents, linebreaks, etc. In a static XSL FO description, these two heading models would be represented by sugnificantly different sub-trees.

Now, the above described problem cannot be solved in a XSLT stylesheet because XSLT has no idea of fonts and widths. And on the other hand, in XSL FO, I cannot express it either because there's no way there to program the necessary choice algorithm. Finally I was able to solve this problem satisfactorily using TeX, which allows to mix "control flow" and visual statements (although TeX is a nightmare in many other respects).

So, what XSL experts would say? Am I missing something? Or am I, with my designer needs, out of luck in XSL world?
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