Current XSL sheets 1.55.0 does not let appendix to be a
back matter in articles. On the other hand documents
that can not be considered as a book ( is number of
pages makes silly to call it a book), like article
should have a parameter set by the user if appendix,
glossary index should be considered as back matter.
This will help to have a two colum layout for the
backmatter
Thanks
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Hi Togan,
I've been going back through the list of open bugs and
feature requests and came across this request from you.
Are the current (V1.66.1) stylesheets now dealing with
appendix in article the way you'd expect?
If not, can you explain what you mean when you say that
appendix in article "should be considered as back matter"?
The current stylesheets chunk appendix for article into
a separate file. What else should they do that they're
not doing now?
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I just realized you filed this as an FO feature
request. So please ignore what I said about chunking,
since it's irrelevant to FO output.
But I'm still not sure I understand what you mean when
you say that appendix in article "should be considered
as back matter".
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I think he means that an appendix, glossary, index, etc. could
start a new page sequence. Currently an appendix is in the
same page sequence, and follows after the end of the article
text on the same page. It doesn't even have an entry in
titlepage.templates.xml, so there is no option to trigger a
page break.
Since the appendix is contained in the article, it would
normally be processed within the same fo:flow. I'm not sure
how you could break it out.
Perhaps using a book is the better solution, containing a
single article and any back matter. A book doesn't have to
be long, it just has to contain some components.
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I mean that an appendix, glossary, index, etc. should
start a new page sequence.
Now for the recommendation of using <book> intead of <article> it
does not sound logical. Yes it does provide a solution to the backmatter
problem yet it is not an elegant solution, pardon the jargon it is a dirty
hack :-)
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I didn't mean to use book instead of article, but to use book
as a wrapper around the article and back matter elements.
And move the appendix to follow the article instead of being
contained in the article:
<book>
<article>
...
</article>
<appendix>
...
</appendix>
<glossary>
...
</glossary>
<index/>
</book>
This validates, and when you set the generate.toc parameter
to just 'article toc', then you get a page sequence for your
article and page sequences for your back matter elements. I
think it gives you what you want with no changes to the
stylesheet.
A book isn't necessarily a fat book with a lot of front matter.
In this case, it is just the slip case for the components you
want to process as a unit.
The main reason I suggested this approach is because I
cannot think of another case in the DocBook XSL stylesheets
where an element starts a page sequence, and then a child
of that element starts another page sequence. Since page
sequences cannot nest, the stylesheet loses the elegant
recursive use of apply-templates to process children. The
article template would have to deselect appendix and other
backmatter children when it does apply-templates within its
own flow, and then start new page sequences after its own
flow concludes for each of the backmatter children. It can
be done, but that feels more like a hack to me. 8^)
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Bob, I very much agree with Togan here.
The thing is, putting a title-less book wrapper around
an article is going to generate some undesirable
chunking behavior and ugliness in the HTML output (if
you want to generate HTML and FO from the same source).
From the markup side, the only alternatives I can think
of are also not so wonderful:
A. put the title on the book and then put all the
article content in a title-less article wrapper
under that; but do that and you get an ugly TOC an
ugly article titlepage because it lacks the title
B. forget about using one article at all and just do
the dirty hack of really marking it up as a book;
consequence: the parts that were marked up as
sections in the article are now marked up as
articles in the book and you end up with a bunch of
tiny articles that anybody else would call sections...
I don't know what the level of effort is to implement
what you've described ("deselect appendix and other
backmatter children when it does apply-templates within
its own flow, and then start new page sequences after
its own flow concludes for each of the backmatter
children") but it seems like if that's do-able it might
be worth trying to implement it...
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