[publican-list] Possible alternative to FOP!

[Jeff Fearn]

On 08/12/2011 01:03 PM, Joshua Wulf wrote:
> Jeff, what about this:
>
> Page Breaking
>
> The current page breaking algorithm of WebKit leaves much to be desired.
> Basically webkit will render everything into one long page, and then cut
> it up into pages. This means that if you have two columns of text where
> one is vertically shifted by half a line. Then webkit will cut a line
> into to pieces display the top half on one page. And the bottom half on
> another page. It will also break image in two and so on. If you are
> using the patched version of QT you can use the CSS page-break-inside
> property to remedy this somewhat.

You may note in the sample PDFs that:

1: chapters have page breaks before them

2: admonitions & examples don't break across pages unless they are 
longer than a page

This is because the test is using a patched QT, installed outside the 
normal library path, and I modified the CSS file to break those ways to 
see if it was easy to overcome such issues.

We'd need to add more rules to make images and such avoid breaking, but 
it's relatively straight forward and something we could get done in a 
reasonable time.

> There is no easy solution to this
> problem, until this is solved try organising your HTML documents such
> that it contains many lines on which pages can be cut cleanly.

I think technical content lends itself to having many breaking 
locations, and using this tool we could easily add style rules that 
writers could set when they need to specify a line break.

e.g. since status gets translated to a class, we could add CSS classes 
break-before, break-after, etc, to allow writers to force page breaks 
when the PDF isn't quite right.

While the output isn't perfect I think it lends itself to easier layout 
manipulation by the writer, which makes it easier to deal with specific 
issues. Currently we can't customise FOP output this way so if your 
content doesn't exactly match the layout expectations then you are outta 
luck.

> See also: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=9,
> http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=33 and
> http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=57.

Cheers, Jeff.