Has anyone given any thought to how XSL-FO could be applied to
heavily-designed documents, such as magazines? At first glance, it would
appear that XSL-FO is not applicable, but I've been thinking about it
and I think there might be some ways it could be done but I'm not sure
how sound my thinking is and I was wondering if anyone else has thought
about these ideas.
For design, I see the following main challenges:
- Handling "continued" text flows (article continued on page xxx)
- Text wrapping around arbitrarily-placed rectangular areas
- Text wrapping around curved areas
- Fine tuning of text layout--leading, word spacing, block spacing, etc.
That is, all the things that are workaday for QuarkXPress, InDesign, etc.
XSL-FO is already pretty close on wrapping text around rectangular
areas--you can do a lot with side floats and I think a few careful
extensions could get you the rest of the way.
For curved areas, there might be some useful synergy with SVG here, but
I don't know what complexities that might involve, but it seems like it
can't be that hard (but that's easy for me to say).
For continued stuff, I'm thinking that when using a page layout system
like Quark, you're already prepared to put text into flows pretty much
by hand, so it seems reasonable that a multi-pass process that does the
flowing by creating disconnected blocks in the FO might be acceptable
but not ideal--it would require feedback from the first pagination pass
to figure out what content in the first area didn't fit and therefore
needs to go into the continuation of it.
For fine tuning, I'm thinking that it might be possible to use an
approach where you capture element-specific characteristic values in a
separate document that is then applied to the input XML document at FO
generation time in order to apply local tweaks. This would require an
interactive editor to capture the tweaks, but that shouldn't be that
difficult (essentially a beefed-up version of what Epic does with its
format override PIs today).
Has anyone had any similar thoughts? Am I nuts (on this issue)?
Why do I care? Partly just because it bugs me as an engineer that this
unsolved problem exists and partly because I have at least one customer
that really wants to be able to do XML-based production of designed
magazines and I just don't see any other viable solution--the XML
import/export features of Quark and InDesign are just not complete
enougn, in large part because of the inherent and avoidable loss of
going from XML structures to the minimal internal structures these tools
use.
Cheers,
Eliot
--
W. Eliot Kimber, eliot@xxxxxxxxxx
Consultant, ISOGEN International
1016 La Posada Dr., Suite 240
Austin, TX 78752 Phone: 512.656.4139
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