Misaligned text columns

[FB...@wiley.com]

I'm trying to set a document in two columns using fop (0.20.5).
Unfortunately, when the two columns do not have exactly the same amount of
material, the baselines of the first lines of the two columns do not align.
They can be as much as 1.5 lines off.

fop does not seem to have implemented .minimum and .maximum (or
.conditionality or .precedence) in space-before and space-after, so the
vertical spaces in the columns are constant rather than mutable. This seems
to be at least part of the problem; leastwise, mucking about with 'stretch'
and 'shrink' values doesn't seem to help..

Neither does giving a value to display-align in the region-body make any
difference.

I'm rather mystified, since my reading of the XSL spec and Pawson's book
gives me no clue how I could achieve this effect if I wanted to.

Is there any help for this?

Thanks!



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Re: Misaligned text columns

[Chris Bowditch <bo...@hotmail.com>]

FBartlet@wiley.com wrote:

> I'm trying to set a document in two columns using fop (0.20.5).
> Unfortunately, when the two columns do not have exactly the same amount of
> material, the baselines of the first lines of the two columns do not align.
> They can be as much as 1.5 lines off.

I cant think of a workaround in the general sense.

You could try placing your content into a table, starting a new row for 
each paragraph and using keep-together="always" on the rows. That way 
the top of each column would always start with a new paragraph and the 
baseline alignment may be improved.

Another technique is to try to guess when a column has been filled and 
place break-after="column" at appropriate places in the XSL-FO during 
XSLT processing. Very messy I know...

> fop does not seem to have implemented .minimum and .maximum (or
> .conditionality or .precedence) in space-before and space-after, so the
> vertical spaces in the columns are constant rather than mutable. This seems
> to be at least part of the problem; leastwise, mucking about with 'stretch'
> and 'shrink' values doesn't seem to help..
> 
> Neither does giving a value to display-align in the region-body make any
> difference.

display-align is only implemented in block-containers and table cells.

> 
> I'm rather mystified, since my reading of the XSL spec and Pawson's book
> gives me no clue how I could achieve this effect if I wanted to.

They wouldnt give you any pointers to solve this problem, because they 
are written in general XSL-FO terms, with a fully compliant XSL-FO 
formatter in mind. In other words they are not written specifically for 
FOP users.

Chris



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Re: Misaligned text columns

["J.Pietschmann" <j3...@yahoo.de>]

FBartlet@wiley.com wrote:
> I'm trying to set a document in two columns using fop (0.20.5).
> Unfortunately, when the two columns do not have exactly the same amount of
> material, the baselines of the first lines of the two columns do not align.
> They can be as much as 1.5 lines off.
> 
> fop does not seem to have implemented .minimum and .maximum (or
> .conditionality or .precedence) in space-before and space-after, so the
> vertical spaces in the columns are constant rather than mutable. This seems
> to be at least part of the problem; leastwise, mucking about with 'stretch'
> and 'shrink' values doesn't seem to help..
Correct.

However, I wonder why you get the effect. There is a bug which
prevents FOP from discarding display space at the edge of a
reference area, i.e. at the column top, however, unless the
new column also starts a new block with some non-zero space-before,
the text should be aligned.

BTW the spec is rather hazy about alignment in multi-column
layout. There are alignment options for lists and tables, but
I don't remember there was much said about aligning the first
lines of neighboring columns. Aligning the last lines would be
great too. There are, however, more pressing issues with the code.

J.Pietschmann


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