[xep-support] Double Page Numbering Revisited

[G. Ken Holman]

At 2006-03-30 17:39 -0600, Steve Ylvisaker wrote:
>I have done this by putting a marker at the end of the document.

The original poster implied there was a number of series of slides in 
a single publishing run, such that this would not work ... you would 
only get the slide count of the last series.

>For example put an empty block as the last item of content and 
>giving it an id attribute.
>
>for example
>
><fo:page-number-citation ref-id="theend"/> (this generates the page 
>number of the last page)
>...
><fo:block id="theend"/> (this goes at the very end of the document)

Note the above approach is susceptible to collision with authored id= 
values in the user input XML.  What if the user authored an 
id="theend" in their own XML and the stylesheet copied that into the 
FO tree?  Then there would be a collision.

The same issue arises when you are aggregating multiple XML documents 
(each with their own independent use of id=) into a single formatted 
result ... you cannot just copy the authored id= into the FO tree.

I recommend to my students, and it is in my book, that authored 
elements with id= attributes are given the generate-id() value for 
id= in the FO tree.  That way, even if two aggregated XML documents 
have the same id= they will have different id= values in the FO tree 
and you don't get a collision.

But that still leaves "what to do with the id= to choose at the 
end"?  I suggest using generate-id(/) for the anchor at the end of 
the flow because, even in an aggregated publication, it is impossible 
for any idref= to point to the root node (since it isn't an element), 
so you are guaranteed that your page count anchor is independent from 
any authored anchor, while authored anchors in each file are 
independent from authored anchors in other files.

>If you have the O'Reilly book by Dave Pawson see page 173

I see in the prose on that page that Dave's approach does not address 
issues of ambiguity or aggregation.

If you have the paper edition of my book (on store bookshelves) my 
proposed method above is on page 99, and in the electronic edition of 
my book (for sale on our web site; a free excerpt can be downloaded 
at no charge) it is on page 98.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . Ken


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