[publican-list] Dbfo keep-together instructions stripped out by publican?

[Jeff Fearn]

Hi Norm,

On 01/26/2012 08:20 PM, Norman Dunbar wrote:
> I'm running Publican 2.8 on Fedora 16.
>
> I have a manual that I'm creating and in order to prevent all tables
> splitting across pages, I've added the following to a customisation
> layer which I've called pdf.xsl after renaming the Publican file of the
> same name to pdf.original.xsl. (This is in the /usr/share/publican/xsl
> directory.)
>
> <?xml version='1.0'?>
> <!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet>
>
> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
> ...
>
> <!-- import original pdf.xsl file from Publican -->
> <xsl:import href="pdf.original.xsl"/>
>
> <!-- Don't allow tables to split over a page boundary. This will,
> ++ unfortunately, cause large tables to crush up. These will
> ++ need an individual processing instruction as follows:
> ++
> ++ <table>
> ++ (optional) <title> ... </title>
> ++ <?dbfo keep-together="auto" ?>
> ++ ...
> ++ </table>
> -->
> <xsl:attribute-set name="table.properties">
> <xsl:attribute name="keep-together.within-column">always</xsl:attribute>
> </xsl:attribute-set>
>
> <xsl:attribute-set name="informaltable.properties">
> <xsl:attribute name="keep-together.within-column">always</xsl:attribute>
> </xsl:attribute-set>
>
> ...
>
> </xsl:stylesheet>
>
> The problem is that while the tables do not split over a page break,
> which is what I want, the two very large tables now get crushed up onto
> a page.
>
> I looked in the tmp/en-US/xml folder for the Publican processed xml file
> and the processing instruction I added to the big tables had been
> stripped out.
>
> There were no warning messages about deprecated or invalid xml when
> processing the particular file in question.

We do silently strip out processing instructions. It's quite deliberate, 
when we started making Publican writers adding PI's caused us _endless_ 
amounts of consternation. That decision was made long before Publican 
was made public and almost as long forgotten!

> Is there a way I can get around this please?

You can override table output in your pdf.xsl file and set the attribute 
in the XML::FO output directly. You could base it on a role on the 
docbook table.

> As a workaround I could add the instruction to the Publican generated
> XML file, there are only two large tables, but how do I then get the
> build to (a) stop after generating the XML and (b) generate the PDF from
> the tmp/en-US/xlm files rather than starting again from my source files?

It's much better for your sanity to edit your brands XSL than to try 
interceding in the build process.

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
"Reply All" why you shouldn't use it: 
http://www.emailreplies.com/#12replytoall