From: G. Ken Holman (gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com)
Date: Sun Sep 07 2003 - 18:22:12 PDT
At 2003-09-08 10:07 +1000, Kevin Yank wrote:
>I am starting work on a DocBook XML project that will be published as a two
>volume set of books. Each of these books must contain an index to both
>books, with page number citations of the form "I-123" for page 123 of volume
>I.
>
>DocBook XML appears to have all the tools to model this. I can enclose the
>two <book>s in a <set> and end both <book>s with a <setindex>.
>
>Things are less straightforward when it comes to the rendering process,
>though. As far as I can tell, XSL-FO in general and XEP in particular don't
>let you produce two output documents from a single source document in one
>process, do they?
True, XSL-FO is defined for only one process. Cross references used for
page number citations are to locations inside of the area tree, and there
is only one area tree in a process.
>I would appreciate any suggestions on how to go about producing two
>PostScript output files which share page number citations as described
>above.
Would you accept a single PostScript file with both volumes, the second one
starting at page 1, and splitting the resulting file in two? Or creating a
PDF from the PDF and then splitting the PDF into two using a publicly
available PDF library like iText?
Because the process works over only a single FO file you will get your
"cross-volume" references resolved correctly.
My approach would be three sets of pages in one output FO file: volume 1, a
magic one-page signal file, then volume 2. I would then produce the PDF
from the PostScript and write a Python program accessing the iText library
in Java through Jython, streaming the pages of the PDF to a volume 1 output
file, tripping over the magic page as a signal to start volume 2, then
putting the rest of the pages of the PDF file out to a volume 2 output
file. I suppose if I really needed PostScript results I could probably go
from the PDF to PostScript, but I've never researched how that might be ...
of course if there were a library that split PostScript files then I would
just split the result and not bother with the PDF.
It would be totally automated and unattended and result in two distinct files.
I hope this helps!
................... Ken
-- Next public European delivery: 3-day XSLT/2-day XSL-FO 2003-09-22 Next public US delivery: 3-day XSLT/2-day XSL-FO 2003-10-13 Instructor-led on-site corporate, government & user group training for XSLT and XSL-FO world-wide: please contact us for the details G. Ken Holman mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com Crane Softwrights Ltd. http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/f/ Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0 +1(613)489-0999 (F:-0995) ISBN 0-13-065196-6 Definitive XSLT and XPath ISBN 0-13-140374-5 Definitive XSL-FO ISBN 1-894049-08-X Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath ISBN 1-894049-11-X Practical Formatting Using XSL-FO Member of the XML Guild of Practitioners: http://XMLGuild.info Male Breast Cancer Awareness http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/f/bc ------------------- (*) To unsubscribe, send a message with words 'unsubscribe xep-support' in the body of the message to majordomo@renderx.com from the address you are subscribed from. (*) By using the Service, you expressly agree to these Terms of Service http://www.renderx.com/tos.html
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