[Firebird-docs] Widowed section headers in PDF

[Paul V. <pa...@vi...>]

[ took conversation here because subject concerns all docwriters ]

Hi Lester,

>> Is there any way to get DocBook to start a new page in the printed
>> versions. The heading on the bottom of a page, and text on the next
>> page looks very mickey mouse.

> That's not DocBook, but a limitation of Apache FOP, which doesn't
> honour keep-with-next directives (except in tables). Yes, it's
> annoying. Maybe we can work around it by including a PDF
> postprocessor in the build process, but this will take a lot of time
> to investigate and test - which I don't have at the moment. But I'll
> see if I can hand-edit the PDF to get them right. Will get back to
> you on this.

Hmmm, no luck :-(

It turns out that once a PDF file is produced, the text-structural
information is lost. (Every bit of text only has an absolute position
on the page.) So you can do all kinds of things: deleting entire
pages, moving them around, changing the margins, adding text and
images, deleting text, etc. etc... but you can NOT repaginate in the
sense that you insert a hard page break before a widowed header to
reunite the header with the section text.

This goes for Adobe, but also for any postprocessors out there.

So the only option (at least as long as we use Apache FOP) seems to
be: wrap every header in a single-cell table together with the text
that follows it. This requires editing our transformation stylesheets;
don't know how complicated it will be, but I'll have a look at it
(somewhere in the next weeks).


Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog