Ascii file generation questions

["Illiano, Vincent" <IL...@onyx.dcri.duke.edu>]

> Hi fellow Fop'ers,
> 
> I've built a dynamic document generation system using FOP.  I'm currently
> using version 0.20.4.  The 2 supported output formats are PDF and ASCII
> text.  I know that the ASCII renderer was never meant to be production
> quality.  However, with some tweaking, I have been able to get out of it
> what I need.  I'm including an example text output file that was generated
> by my system using FOP.
> 
> The main problem that I have found with the text output generation is the
> line-overwriting problem.  However, I have been able to fix this for the
> most part by adding extra space before the blocks where the overwriting
> occurs.  For example:
> 
> change
> 	<fo:block>Procedure Comment</fo:block>
> to
> 	<fo:block space-before="10.5pt">Procedure Comment</fo:block>
> 
> often fixes the overwriting problem that may occur in a particular
> paragraph of text.
> 
> Is there someone on this list who can explain to me why the overwriting
> problem occurs and if it's something that could be fixed?  I can volunteer
> to dig in and do it myself with just a little guidance.  Also, is the text
> output feature planned in the redesign?  I really hope so, because I think
> text is a valid output format.  Again, I can volunteer to work on that
> feature if it's not already in the plan.
> 
> Here is the example text file.  Thanks, -Vincent
> 
>  <<vreport.txt>> 
>