[xep-support] Table Issues

W. Eliot Kimber eliot at isogen.com
Mon Nov 4 16:17:31 PST 2002


Attached is the usual FO instance and pair of PDFs generated therefrom 
by XEP and XSL Formatter.

This set of samples is an attempt to explore most of the useful or 
interesting variations in table width and column width markup. I think 
that XEP is producing non-conforming results in a few cases and is 
failing to report errors or warnings in a few cases.

In addition to table geometry problems, I noticed these problems:

- space-before on table-and-caption isn't honored between tables (but 
appears to be when table follows fo:block.

- Keep-with-next between table-caption and table is not being honored 
(see tables 13 and 15).

Also, this sample uses explicit inline progression dimension on 
fo:inline, which XSL Formatter honors and XEP does not. It's used to get 
the hanging indent for the table caption.

Here are the possible problems I've identified, based on my reading of 
the XSL and CSS rules for table width calculation. In general, XSL 
Formatter gives what I would consider to be the correct result when 
there is variance with XEP's results (I've identified those places where 
XSL Formatter appears to be in error).

Tables 1 and 2: Tables should be only as wide as required to contain 
text of narrowest column without wrapping, with other columns the same 
width. Thus the table should not be as wide as the body area.

Table 6: Table should only be as wide as required to contain the cell 
content, not body-wide.

Table 7: XEP's rendering is correct, XSL Formatter's is wrong (too much 
width in first column).

Table 9: XEP's is correct.

Tables 10, 11, 12: Their markup is erroneous by the FO spec but neither 
XEP nor XSL Formatter issue warnings or errors. Both provide identical 
fallback behavior. I actually don't know why the FO spec says it's an 
error to use proportional column widths with explicit IPD but 
table-layout="auto" as there's clearly no ambiguity about the table 
width. But the spec says it's an error.

Table 13: Caption isn't kept with table body.

Table 14: XEP's response to limited horizontal width in this case is not 
what I would prefer. I think XSL Formatter's response in this case is 
more appropriate, especially given the presence of punctuation in the 
text (e.g., "-").

Table 15: Another keep failure (but the colors are rendered very nicely).

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber, eliot at isogen.com
Consultant, ISOGEN International

1016 La Posada Dr., Suite 240
Austin, TX  78752 Phone: 512.656.4139


[David Tolpin: the file is too big for the list; the message bounced. I've approved
the message but placed the file to http://www.renderx.com/~dvd/eliot/table-samples.zip ]
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