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DuanGauche_232811-Visitor
1-Visitor
September 8, 2011
Question

Storing styler output in attributes

  • September 8, 2011
  • 4 replies
  • 1154 views

Hi all,


I have a custom XSD and am I styling for PDF using the APP engine in Editor 6.0 M10.


I am looking for a way to store things like numbering and other context related information in attributes. An example of this would be storing the font family and size as it is applied by the stylesheet in the attributes of the element being styled.


This will mean that an external system which receives the XML data would be able to tell that a title was "printed" in a certain font and size.


I have had a look at using xpath in genetated text, but have not been able find a logical solution. I assume one would need to capture the generated text for numbering in some sort of variable and then write that variable's value into the attribute of the relevant element.


I would appreciate a pointer in the right direction.


Thanks,


Duan

    4 replies

    L
    largyres1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    September 10, 2011

    Hi Duan,


    Interesting problem for which I don't have any answer other than writing anXSL taking the stylesheet as an input. Line numbers sound like even more of a challenge since they require multiple formatting passes.


    Purists (beware), many of whomwho don't live in the real world where we need to communicate with the less-than-pure, would say you're missing the point of course ...


    Regards,


    - Lou Argyres

    Continuing Education of the Bar - California
    Oakland, CA



    In Reply to Duan Gauche:



    Hi all,


    I have a custom XSD and am I styling for PDF using the APP engine in Editor 6.0 M10.


    I am looking for a way to store things like numbering and other context related information in attributes. An example of this would be storing the font family and size as it is applied by the stylesheet in the attributes of the element being styled.


    This will mean that an external system which receives the XML data would be able to tell that a title was "printed" in a certain font and size.


    I have had a look at using xpath in genetated text, but have not been able find a logical solution. I assume one would need to capture the generated text for numbering in some sort of variable and then write that variable's value into the attribute of the relevant element.


    I would appreciate a pointer in the right direction.


    Thanks,


    Duan


    C
    ClayHelberg18-Opal
    18-Opal
    September 10, 2011
    Hi Duan-



    I had an application that required this sort of thing a while back, and
    I ended up taking exactly the approach that Lou recommends. I wrote an
    XSLT stylesheet that takes both the source document and the stylesheet
    as inputs and generates an "augmented" version of the source document
    with formatting attributes added to each element as output. But I have
    to say that essentially re-implementing Styler as an XSLT stylesheet was
    no picnic. There are lots of references that occur in a Styler
    stylesheet and you have to make sure your XSLT is dereferencing them
    correctly. And you have to make sure that you get priorities to match up
    correctly too; in Styler you can have a particular formatting attribute
    defined in more than one place (e.g. main Element, one or more
    conditions under the Element, a property set, etc.), and Styler has
    rules to determine which value "wins", so you have to make sure the
    rules in your XSLT match those that Styler uses.



    To be honest, I wouldn't recommend going down this path unless your use
    case is really critical and justifies a significant investment of time
    and resources.



    --Clay



    Clay Helberg

    Senior Consultant

    TerraXML


    G
    GarethOakes16-Pearl
    16-Pearl
    September 11, 2011
    Here is another idea, seeing as the OP is using APP.



    If you upgrade to 6.0 M020 (release next week?) then I believe that will
    ship with the APP v11 component. APP v11 allows writing to the DOM
    representation of the main XML stream.



    1. Implement APP Stylersheet "overrides" for each context/condition for
    which you are interested in capturing the font information.

    2. Use APP function variable ^[prop] to get the current information,
    eg. ^[prop tf,l] will get the active font longname and ^[prop th] will get
    the active font height.

    3. Use APP DOM functions to write that information into the main XML
    stream as attributes on-the-fly.

    4. Finally have some mechanism at the end of the formatting/printing
    passes which serialises the amended DOM to disk.



    Or a more low-tech version of the same thing:



    1. As above.

    2. As above.

    3. At each ^[prop] place where you are capturing the current font
    state, instead of writing to the DOM, store the font information into an
    array. The font information array sould be indexed against the current
    character position in the main XML stream.

    4. Once formatting/printing have completed, iterate through the font
    information array using APP primitive commands or Perl. The idea is to move
    to each character position in the XML and insert the required attributes
    into the markup at that character position. (The trick is to ensure you keep
    offsetting the character positions stored in your array to account for the
    previous attributes you just inserted J)



    If none of that sounds good, then my final idea for this morning would be to
    use the APP XML print driver to print your page to XML. The resulting XML
    format is like a PDF description of a page and does not resemble your
    original source markup at all. However it does capture most of the styling
    information.



    Either way Duan it sounds like you're in for some serious mucking about with
    Styler/APP/XSLT (unless your application is very simple). What you are
    effectively asking for is to track all styling decisions made during
    composition and there is nothing out of the box for that.



    -Gareth


    C
    ChrisWestern12-Amethyst
    12-Amethyst
    September 12, 2011

    Hi Duan,


    Sounds very similar to something we've recently been doing for a customer that augments the XML, in this instance with line and page break information. This follows a similar idea to what Gareth is suggesting but augmenting the XML with custom PI's durring the formatting pass and returns this to Editor (outside of the integrated APP and using a direct APP template). So this does work well if you chose this approach.


    Regards


    Chris




    Chris Western
    tformat ltd
    Arbortext sVAR/MSP
    www.tformat.com


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