[xep-support] rx:pinpoint

[Nikolai Grigoriev]

Richard,

> The latest version of XEP has an extension which facilitates 
> the creation of revision bars. Unfortunately I cannot find any 
> explanation of how this extension is used, either on the 
> RenderX site or in the documentation. 

rx:pinpoint is a very low-level facility to put user-defined marks
into the XML representation of the output. It produces a zero-size 
inline object that works as a labeled pin, marking a specific 
location on the page; you can see these marks in the output from
H4XML, and postprocess the XML representation before 
feeding to the output generator. In this way, it is possible to 
produce many special effects: you can reshuffle the output 
as you like, draw shapes and text on the page - using semantic
data conveyed by pins. 

Revision bars can be somehow emulated by the following trick: you 
mark the start of the changed part with a pin, and its end with another 
one. It is not very difficult to add a bar that extends vertically from 
the first pin to the second.

However, this way of doing revision bars is quite tricky, and 
absolutely not portable: you have to leverage formatter's Java API.
In our team's opinion, revision bars deserve an extension of their 
own: they should become part of the input formalism. Future releases 
of XEP (though probably not the closest one) will offer a solution; 
right now, I'd rather discourage implementations of revision bars 
through rx:pinpoint.

> Does anyone have any information on this ... example fo 
> documents, stylesheets, etc.?

I don't believe anyone can have experience in using it.  It is 
a very low-level stuff, and quite a fresh one; we're still not sure 
if we are doing the right thing to expose it to users :-). 

Best regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX

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