[xep-support] Re: fo:page-sequence

[Michael Sulyaev]

On 01/14/2011 12:18 PM, Dave Pawson wrote:
> [error] There can be only one 'fo:flow' element inside 'fo:page-sequence'.
> Is there support for this in xep please?

Hello Dave,

XEP does not support flow maps (neither multiple flows) at the moment. 
See http://www.renderx.com/reference#XSL11_Support.

We used to have it implemented in another formatting engine. However, 
when it came to producing some good looking samples, the "flow maps" 
feature appeared to be less valuable than I expected.

Myself I felt very enthusiastic about this feature and the 
implementation, and I've produced a few issues of a newspaper - several 
regions, several flows, different design for first, last, left and right 
pages, headers and footers and so on. It looked pretty good. But as any 
newspaper, it had a fixed number of pages.

At that time I understood that the "flow maps" feature does not give 
much help to produce good looking newspapers with *arbitrary content*, 
because arbitrary lengths of concurrent flows result in a lot of blank 
space, long "tails" or dropped content (in case of fixed number of 
pages). Creating an newspaper issue still requires the same *manual 
editing* of content to make it fit the regions.

If we could have a way do declare how empty instances of regions (their 
own flow-source-list already drawn) could get joined or reassigned to be 
used by those flows that still have some content to draw -- that would 
probably make more sense.

Well, that was a short and not well spoken explanation of why we do not 
have this feature implemented in XEP. If you have real-world examples 
where this feature is used - I'd appreciate some links.

Regards,
Michael Sulyaev
RenderX