[xmlroff] The next xmlroff release

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

I want to get into the habit of making more frequent, ideally monthly,
xmlroff releases so the project has some momentum.

The holiday break and the current failure of my New Year's resolution
to get up early and work on xmlroff before starting my day job hasn't
helped progress.

I propose to work on the bugs and unimplemented features shown up by
the samples for the XML 2003 "XSL FO Chef's Tools Exhibition" since
that will shortly be the most visible indicator of xmlroff's
abilities.  I doubt that IdeaAlliance will be interested in updating
results, but Mulberry Technologies may well repeat the exercise at
future conferences, plus it will always be possible to show progress
on the "Examples" pages on the xmlroff web site.

I don't know how many of you have run the Chef's Tools samples, but
the samples need to be modified by a "fixup.xsl" stylesheet before
xmlroff can do much with them.

Since "fixup.xsl" writes a message every time it modifies the samples,
the most direct way to show progress is to reduce the number of
messages by reducing the number of times "fixup.xsl" has to modify the
samples.

The prime candidates for changes are:

 - Implementing border and padding shorthands

   I have picked away at this in the past.

   This needs a new expression evaluator (or more than one) to handle
   the different syntax of the shorthand expressions, a new four-part
   and/or three-part datatype to represent the result of evaluating a
   shorthand, and code in fo-context-util to resolve shorthands.

 - Implementing system-color()

   This can be based on the Pango color attribute code, which borrows
   from Tcl/Tk code.

 - "height" properties on tables

   This doesn't work with table cells that span rows.

   This needs yet another table-related area object type and/or
   implementing spanning-cell-specific versions of
   fo_area_n_children() and others.

Regards,


Tony Graham